"If Only Everyone" was Armenia's official submission for the best foreign language film at the 85th Annual Academy Awards (Oscars). Shot under the patronage of the country's president, Serzh Sargsyan, this film promotes a one-sided political agenda on a sensitive subject of the Armenian-Azerbaijani ethnic conflict.
 In 1991, Armenia invaded the neighboring Azerbaijan over the latter's territory of Nagorno-Karabakh. By 1994, the Armed Forces of Armenia occupied the said region and seven adjacent districts - the fifth of Azerbaijan's internationally recognized territory - and expelled more than 800,000 Azerbaijanis from their homes.
Prior to the conflict, Karabakh's 18th century historic center of Shusha was predominantly inhabited by over 30,000 ethnic Azerbaijanis. After the Armenian occupation in May 1992, the city lays in ruins with barely 2,000 ethnic Armenian settlers and a fabricated name of "Shushi."
Since 1993, four resolutions of U.N. Security Council and several of those from U.N. General Assembly, Council of Europe and European Union called for immediate and unconditional withdrawal of the occupying Armenian forces and for return of Azerbaijani refugees to their homes, but to no avail.
Sargsyan's government also continues to deny responsibility and obstruct justice for the Khojaly Massacre - a mass killing of 613 Azerbaijani civilians, including 106 women and 63 children - conducted by Armenian forces in February 1992. Human Rights Watch called it the worst massacre of the conflict, several U.S. states recognized it as a war crime, while Mr. Sargsyan, the film's sponsor, referred to it as an act of "breaking the stereotypes" of Azerbaijanis.
These are just few of the facts the viewer will not see in "If Only Everyone." Instead the film misrepresents the ethnic conflict as a fait accompli struggle for self-determination to gain viewer sympathy. The claim, however, cannot be justified by mass murder, war crimes and ethnic cleansing carried out under the patronage of its main sponsor. I join all Azerbaijani-Americans, members of Azerbaijan Society of America and Azerbaijani-American Council, to denounce Armenia's 2013 Oscar nomination.
Tarana Jafarova
New Haven