Today, the outstanding problem confronting Azerbaijan is the slow death of Lake Urmu by drying up and its subsequent desertification.
Excerpts from technical information
· The imminent salt-dust storms are a time bomb and may go off any time
· The impact is the desertification of the lake bed with 80 billion tons of salts
· This will be quite impossible to control it
· The salt-dust storms are anticipated to give rise to all sort of skin and respiratory problems
· Agriculture in the whole region will be undermined
· The death of the lake is the death of Azerbaijan and the extinction of artemia from the region.
Iran’s parliament refused to allocate money to Save Urmia Lake.
Behaving irresponsibly by these Members of Majlis has provoked the public opinion and the people are minded with the situation and the question is this: how can the government know less than our nation and 100s of caring scientists? On the grounds of scientific research by caring scientists, the popular perception of discriminatory policies implemented by the Iranian authorities towards all the (Southern) Azerbaijani problems and affairs do seem to be truth and not perception anymore.
The caring nation of (Southern) Azerbaijan has done anything possible to bring the problem into the agenda even though their information media is meagre but the Iranian authorities remain indifferent to the problem. Azerbaijanis have always urged the appropriate authorities to take interest in the problem. Now we cannot overlook some of the learned scientists concluding that the drying up of Lake Urmu is a deliberate policy!
Today, pressure groups concerned with environmental problems are supported by the governments of the developed countries. We are petrified that in Iran, simply for making protests, individuals expressing their interests in the environmental impacts of Lake Urmu are arbitrarily arrested in tens and detained arbitrarily in detention centres and are subjected to tortures. This year alone, on Nature Day・C 2 February 2011, the people of our region gathered in Qoshachay, along the River Jighati near Sayin Qala Bridge, and sang the motto in Azerbaijani: Let us offer our tears for filling Lake Urmu; in this way they expressed their solidarity with the rest of Azerbaijan including Tebriz and Urmu; and in this way they expressed their duty of care on this issue. In all cases, the people were faced by abuse of the power of the authorities as some of them are still arbitrarily detained.