Reduce U.S. aid to Armenia

As the House Appropriations Committee prepares for a vote on the State, Foreign Operations and Related Programs budget, I would like to call for a reduction of U.S. aid to Armenia and elimination of any aid to the occupied Nagorno-Karabakh region of Azerbaijan.

Since 1990s, the U.S. Congress has been allocating assistance to the victims of the Armenian-Azerbaijani/Nagorno-Karabakh conflict. But in 2005, under pressure from the ethnic special interest groups, wording of the appropriations bills was revised to direct U.S. taxpayer dollars only to a group of fewer than 100,000 Armenians in the occupied Nagorno-Karabakh region of Azerbaijan.

Meanwhile, more than 600,000 ethnic Azerbaijanis, expelled from their homes during the Armenian occupation, were deprived of any U.S. assistance.

Further, in the last six years, the allocation of funds to the Armenian community in Karabakh has been gradually increasing without basis, from $3 million to $8 million.

In regards to the U.S. aid to Armenia, this country's policy has been a major roadblock to peace and development in the South Caucasus. Armenia's regional policy directly challenges the U.S. interests as well.

In 2003, Armenian government sold 1,000 RPG-22M rockets and 260 PKM machine guns to Iran. These weapons were used by the Iranian-backed Hizballah brigades in Iraq to kill a U.S. serviceman.

Thus, at the time when the U.S. national debt nears $15 trillion, another extension of U.S. aid to Armenia is unsubstantiated.

Agshin Taghiyev

Iowa City