White Books [‘White Paper’ in some countries] appear in the world from time to time: documents explaining the policy of a state and its approach to a particular problem. But from the moment it arose in the late 1980s, the problem of Karabakh immediately transcended the framework of internal affairs and relations between Azerbaijan and Armenia. It could not be equated with Ulster, the Basque Country, Transnistria or Abkhazia. None of those attempts to create an independent state aimed to build a monoethnic state. Nowhere else were the methods of outright genocide used as they were in Karabakh, where Armenian invaders tried to erase even the memory of the original Azerbaijani inhabitants of that land. Thus, for the Karabakh conflict, which resulted in tens of thousands of civilian deaths, hundreds of thousands of refugees, and which reduced this most beautiful region of Azerbaijan to deadly desert, “Black Book” is more appropriate.
