The Turkish-Islamic Union which will be constructed as a union of love and friendship will comprise a very wide swath of territory, from Armenia to Israel, Lithuania to Georgia, Russia to Ukraine and from the middle to the European Union as far as China. The Turkish-Islamic Union will be a union that embraces all, and all the countries in the region will be included in it. It would be incompatible with Islamic moral values and with Turkish customs to abandon Armenia, which is a country squeezed into a tiny area in this vast region, a country living in severe poverty and difficulties. The Turkish-Islamic Union, that will represent the finest example of the tolerance, understanding, love and protection described by Allah in the Qur’an, will watch over and protect everyone from every religion, race or way of thinking, living within these borders. It will be a means for salvation for all these communities.

Circles that are unwilling to see the Turkish nation becoming a super power that will rule the world, that wish to break the strength of Turks and that are troubled by the unification of the Turkish-Islamic world are today seeking, as they always have throughout the course of history, to create strife by encouraging feelings of enmity and attempting to create artificial divisions between brother communities. But these stratagems belong back in the dark days of the 1800s. It is impossible for these provocations to succeed in this century, in this time of love, complaisance and illumination through the light of the Qur’an. Despite the efforts of all these circles, Azeris, Turks, Armenians, Russians and all societies living in the region will come together in friendship and brotherhood, and a great Turkish-Islamic Union will be built.

A way of thinking that is not based on friendship and love, that espouses a racial superiority which is absolutely prohibited in the morality of the Qur’an and that seeks a continuation to old hostilities can clearly never succeed or establish this desired unity. In the past, Nagorno Karabagh was not the only scene of invasion, war, injustice and massacre in the Caucasus and in the lands the former USSR. The soviet era was full of genocide of Turkish Muslim communities. In that time the blood of millions of Muslims was shed, innocent women, children and the elderly were subjected to ruthless massacres, tens of millions were exiled from their lands and millions more died during the course of these forced migrations. As it is known, the invasion of Nagorno Karabagh, in which thousands of Azeris were martyred and during which the tragic incidents at Hojali took place, happened under the control and with the support of the Russian administration of the time. More than 30 million people are estimated to have been sent to concentration camps between 1928 and 1953 (the time of Stalin), where more than two-thirds of them, at least 20 million people, lost their lives. A great many of these were Turkish Muslim peoples. The death tolls for Stalin’s time alone are as follows:

-    The execution by shooting of tens of thousands of people and hostages who were imprisoned without trial and the slaughter of hundreds of thousands of workers and peasants who rebelled in between the years 1918-1922.

-    The famine of 1922 which cost the lives of 5 million.

-    The elimination and exile of the Don Cossacks in 1920.

-    Tens of thousands killed in the labor camps in between 1918-1930.

-    The elimination of some 690,000 people during the Great Purge of 1937-1938.

-    The exiling of 2 million kulaks (Russian peasant class) (or people alleged to be kulaks) in 1930-1932.

-    Six million Ukrainians being left to starve during a famine deliberately created in 1932-1933.

-    1938: 138 innocent people shot and buried, mostly consisting of Kyrgyz Turks. This incident went down in history as the Kyrgyzstan Ata-Beyit (Grave of Our Fathers) Massacre.

-    Hundreds of thousands of Poles, Ukrainians, Baltic people, Moldavians and Bessarabians were sent in to exile, first in 1939-1941 and then again in 1944-1945.

-    The exile of the Volga Germans in 1941.

-    The mass exile of the Kalmyk Turks in 1943.

-    The mass exile of the Karachay Turks in 1943.

-    In 1943-1944 the Soviet regime forced some 1.5 million people, made up of Karachays, Malkars, Chechnyans, Ingushetians, Kalmyks, Crimean Tatars and Mesketian Turks into exile thousands of kilometers away from their own lands, mainly in Siberia and Kazakhstan, on the pretext of having collaborated with the enemies during World War II. Some 600,000 of these lost their lives en route or in the camps.

-    In 1944, all the Crimean Turks who had been forgotten and not sent into exile from the village of Arabat were loaded onto an old ship. When the ship reached the open sea, the hatches of the ship were opened and the Crimean Turks left to drown.

-    The 1944 Akhaltsihe (Meskhety) Exile: During World War II, Stalin forced young Akhaltsihe (Meskhetian) Turks from their homes in order to conscript them to fight against the Germans. He gave orders for the rest of the people to be loaded onto trains and sent to exile. Twenty thousand of them lost their lives on the journey from cold, hunger, disease or suffocation.

-    Since the second half of the 19th century, first the Tsarist  government and then the Soviet regime, used up almost all the Azeri oil, leaving only a miniscule amount for the Azeri people. The Azeri people were left with only enough amount of oil and natural gasses to meet their own needs, or even less.

-    The Soviet repression over the Azeri language, culture and national history continued until the 1970s and 1980s.

-    Atheist education continued in Azeri schools, as in the other Turkic republics, until late 1988.

-    In the time of Abulfaz Elchibey the Moscow regime, unwilling to be deprived of the oil and natural gas revenues from Azerbaijan, secretly began inciting the Armenians, as a result of this, almost 250,000 Azeris were forced to leave Armenia.

Russia, which ruthlessly slaughtered trainloads of Akhaltsihe (Ahiska) Turks, murdered thousands of Kyrgyz Turks and buried them in mass graves.  They banned the flags of the Turkic republics, forbade them to speak their own languages and suppressed their living by their own religions.  They closed  mosques, and exiled religious leaders and turned a blind eye to and supported the killings in Nagorno Karabagh.  Today, Russia enjoys very close and good relations with Azerbaijan, and it is natural for it to do so.  Islamic morality requires the events of the past to be left in the past, enmities to come to an end, mistakes to be forgiven and people to wish the best for one another. If what happened in the past had been constantly brought into the equation, then it would never be possible to build good relations in between Azerbaijan and Russia. The fact is that it is not the present Russian administration that is responsible for the slaughter and exile that took place during the Soviet times.  Immaculate people living in today's Russia, which is a great state, are in no way responsible for the misdeeds of previous Russian administrations. We approach them with love and affection and regard them as friends. It is therefore the right thing to do for Azerbaijan to establish good relations with the current Russian government. There is no reason why similar good relations should not be established between Azerbaijan and Armenia. Azerbaijan, which has forgiven the slaughtering of millions of Muslim Turks by former Russian regimes, will of course assume the moral high ground by also forgiving past errors made by Armenia.

It needs to be remembered once more that the Armenians are of the People of the Book. Just like the other states that will take their place under the protection of the Turkish-Islamic Union, such as the Russians, Israelis, Georgians and Ukrainians. Muslims have a responsibility to treat the People of the Book with love and affection. They are entrusted to us by the Prophet Jesus (pbuh) and the Prophet Moses (pbuh). That legacy was protected in the finest way, primarily from the time of our Prophet (may Allah bless his soul and grant him peace), during the time of the four caliphs, in Seljuk times and in the time of the Ottoman Empire. Today it is the Turkish-Islamic Union that will best protect that legacy. Those who want to keep the Turks fragmented, who are reluctant to see the Turkish-Islamic world united, and who want to raise artificial enmities against the Turkish nation and thus make the Turkish-Islamic Union impossible are forgetting all these facts. But the Turkish nation is well aware of these realities and possesses a powerful foresight that will prevent them falling into these snares. The Turkish-Islamic Union will soon be established, and just like during the Age of Felicity, the Turkish-Islamic world will again illuminate the planet with the light of the Qur’an, the love of Allah, and with love and compassion.