The European Parliament,

A. having regard to the recent public demonstrations in Soviet Armenia demanding that the Nagorno-Karabakh region be reunited with the Republic of Armenia,

B. having regard to the historic status of the autonomous region of Nagorno-Karabakh (80 % of whose present population is Armenian) as part of Armenia, to the arbitrary inclusion of this area within Azerbaijan in 1923 and to the massacre of Armenians in the Azerbaijani town of Sumgait in February 1988,

The European Parliament,

A. noting the scale of the mass demonstrations which have taken place in Soviet Armenia and the disturbances in Azarbaijan,

B. noting that these demonstrations took place in the wake of public protests by the Baltic and Tartar peoples,

C. aware that these protests result from the heritage of the past, from unsolved ethnic, cultural, religious and institutional problems and from repression, in some cases brutal, with regard to both individual rights and at national level,