Deputy Prime Minister was caught on lie: data on refugees released on same day with UN were inflated twice
Yesterday United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) issued an annual report, on "Global Trends" for 2012 on the refugees, the displaced people and asylum seekers.
As the Azerbaijani news agency "APA" reads, according to the data of the report posted on the website of UNHCR, there have been 15914 refugees, 600336 IDPs, 2113 asylum seekers in Azerbaijan at the end of 2012. Thus, the total number of displaced people in Azerbaijan is 618,363 people. The information in the report is based on data provided by government, NGO partners, and by the UNHCR.
By the end of 2012 there have been more than 45.2 million of such people in the world. This is more by 2.7 million than it was at the end of 2011. This includes 15.4 million refugees, 937,000 asylum seekers and 28.8 million IDPs.
It is noteworthy that in the same day the Deputy Prime Minister, Chairman of the State Committee for Refugees and IDPs Ali Hasanov touched upon the issues of refugees and internally displaced people. At the same time Baku official’s figures about the number of refugees in Azerbaijan were twice bigger than the data of the UN.
According to the "APA" Ali Hasanov stated, "There are not one million refugees and internally displaced people in Azerbaijan as is usually reports but 1,200,000." The official said that "one million refugees" is the statistic of 1992-1993s. But, as Hasanov says, the number of refugees and IDPs in Azerbaijan increased by 1 million 200 thousand in 20 years.
On September 2, in 1997 at the United Nations Mission of the Republic of Armenia under the UN in New York, a document was spread about "Data on refugees, displaced people and those engaged in military operations in the territories of Nagorno-Karabakh and Azerbaijan." As the document said, according to the 1989 census, in all the areas that now are included in the territory of Nagorno-Karabakh there were all in all 415.6 thousand Azerbaijani people.
According to David Hakobyan, the Migration Agency of the Ministry of Territorial Administration of Armenia, as a result of Azerbaijan's policy of ethnic cleansing in 1988-1992, about 500,000 Armenian refugees were displaced of the country. Around 360,000 of them arrived in Armenia, and the rest left for other post-Soviet countries, as well as the EU, the U.S, etc.
Newsfeed
Videos
Artur Vanetsyan: I think you'll see me more often at various events in future
