MUSLIM HATE IN AZERBAIJAN
Azerbaijan Escalates its Aggression against Armenians
By Uzay Bulut
Providence
March 25, 2022
hile the world’s attention is fixated on the Russian invasion of
Ukraine, Azerbaijan has escalated its aggression against the Armenian
land and people of Artsakh, also known as Nagorno-Karabakh, in the
South Caucasus.
On
March 24, the Azerbaijani Armed Forces violated the line of contact in
the Parukh village in Artsakh and invaded. Women and children in the
village of Khramort were also being evacuated for security reasons, the
Artsakh Information Center reported.
Meanwhile, Artsakh is on the verge of a humanitarian catastrophe that Azerbaijan intentionally created.
From
March 8 to March 19, over 100,000 Armenians in Artsakh were deprived of
gas, heat, and hot water due to Azerbaijan’s deliberate disconnection
of the gas supply to the entire territory of Artsakh. The weather in
the region is at freezing levels (hovering between -10-0° C, or 14-32º
F.). The allegedly damaged portion of the gas pipeline to Artsakh
remains under Azerbaijani control. However, for 11 days, Azerbaijan did
not allow the problem to be assessed and repaired. On March 16,
Armenian officials announced that Azerbaijan decided to permit the gas
pipeline to Artsakh to be fixed, and on March 19, the pipeline was
finally repaired. Yet, two days later, on March 21, Azerbaijan once
again cut off gas supply to Artsakh and the people there remain
deprived of natural gas and heat ever since.
Azerbaijan’s
military aggression has also been on the rise for several months.
According to reports from the ground, Azerbaijan intensively fires
toward Artsakh villages, threatens residents, and hinders their
agriculture work. The European Union is “concerned” over the latest
ceasefire violations and the disruption of natural gas supply, Toivo
Klaar, the EU’s special representative for the South Caucasus and the
crisis in Georgia, told Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty’s Armenian
Service.
In
a speech posted on March 15 on its Twitter account addressing the
international community, the human rights ombudsman of Artsakh, Gegham
Stepanyan, said, “Thousands of Armenians living in Artsakh are
regularly subjected to terroristic and genocidal acts carried out by
Azerbaijan every day.”
All
of these human rights abuses are taking place almost daily while
Artsakh is still trying to mend its wounds from the unprovoked and
unjustified war that Azerbaijan launched against it in 2020.
From
September 27 to November 9, 2020, Azerbaijan—with the support of its
closest ally, Turkey—committed many atrocities and bombed towns and
villages across Artsakh, including homes and maternity hospitals. The
actual number of deaths is still unknown, but around 5,000 Armenians
were reportedly killed, and approximately 90,000 were forcibly
displaced from their ancestral lands.
To
help Azerbaijan during its war against Armenians, Turkey engaged in
large-scale recruitment and transfer of Syrian mercenaries to
Azerbaijan. This was confirmed by a United Nations report issued on
November 11, 2020.
The
Azeri government has not been brought to account for the war crimes and
crimes against humanity it committed during the 2020 war, such as
intentionally attacking civilians, murder, torture, taking of hostages,
and extensive destruction of property. For instance, two Azeri air
raids severely damaged the Ghazanchetsots Cathedral in Shushi, also
known as the Holy Savior Cathedral, on October 8. According to official
data, shelling, rockets, and airstrikes by the Azerbaijani armed forces
damaged at least 71 schools and 14 kindergartens in Artsakh.
More
than a year after the signing of the ceasefire agreement and the
suspension of the war, Azerbaijan continues its aggression and threats
against the indigenous Armenians of Artsakh and Armenia.
According
to journalist Anush Ghavalyan, who is based in Artsakh’s capital
Stepanakert, Azerbaijani armed forces are terrorizing residents of
certain villages in the territory. The Azeris say they will use
military force if the Armenians do not leave the villages. Azeri forces
have targeted the villages Khramort, Khnapat, Parukh, and Nakhijevank
of Askeran region, and Taghavard, Karmir Shuka, Norshen, and Khnushinak
of Martuni region. Ghavalyan told Providence: Azerbaijan is aiming to
finish the ethnic cleansing of Nagorno-Karabakh. They openly can’t go
for a full-blown war today since Russian peacekeepers are deployed
here. So they do everything to disrupt normal life and make people
leave their homeland. Thus, they combine shootings and threats of the
use of force with humanitarian issues like cutting off gas, mobile, and
internet connections, or water, etc., to ruin the lives of those living
in Artsakh.
According
to the official Twitter account of the Artsakh/Karabakh human rights
ombudsman, examples of recent Azeri military escalation, some of which
have caused deaths and injuries of Armenians, include:
• On March 9 and 10, the Azerbaijani armed forces
regularly violated the ceasefire with the use of firearms of various
calibers in the village of the Khnushinak in the Martuni region, and
the village of the Khramort in the Askeran region. On March 10, Suren
Baghdasaryan, 51, a resident of the village of Khramort, was wounded in
the back while doing agricultural work in the yard of his residential
house.
• On March 7, Azerbaijani forces opened fire on
Armenian soldiers in several spots along the buffer zones, which
resulted in the death of at least one Armenian soldier. Courtney E.
Austrian, the deputy chief of mission at the US Mission to the
Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE), issued a
statement on the killing: “The United States mourns the death of the
Armenian servicemember Hrach Manasaryan on March 7.”
• On March 4, Azerbaijani armed forces opened fire at
the village of Norshen. They intimidated civilians by threatening the
use of force and called on them in Armenian to leave their homes.
• On February 26, Armenian schoolchildren filmed a
video of Azerbaijani armed forces threatening them and demanding they
leave the village of Khramort in the Askeran region.
• On February 18, Azerbaijani armed forces violated
the ceasefire and opened fire at the residential houses of the village
of Taghavard in the Martuni region.
• On February 11, Azerbaijani armed forces fired in
the direction of the residential homes in the villages of Karmir Shuka
and Taghavard in the Martuni region. Three children and a woman were
inside their house at the time woke up to the shooting.
These
acts of violence appear to be a continuation of the long-running,
systematic assaults that the Armenians in the region have been exposed
to at the hands of Turks and Azeris. From 1915 to 1923, Armenians in
Ottoman Turkey were the victims of genocide, in which Armenians in the
Caucuses were also targeted. The Islamic Army of the Caucasus, a
military unit of the Ottoman Empire, carried out a massacre against the
Armenian population in Baku in 1918.
Azeri
violence against Armenians has been ongoing in the South Caucasus
region for decades. The February 1988 Sumgait pogroms that Azeris
committed against Armenians were followed by a wave of anti-Armenian
violence spreading to Kirovabad in November 1988 and to Baku in January
1990. These pogroms resulted in the killings or expulsions of hundreds
of thousands of Armenians from what is now known as Azerbaijan.
Azerbaijan’s
particular cruelty against both Armenian civilians and soldiers is
well-documented. A Yazidi-Armenian soldier, Kyaram Sloyan, for
instance, was decapitated by Azerbaijani soldiers during Azerbaijan’s
war against Artsakh in 2016. Videos and pictures showing Azerbaijani
soldiers posing with Sloyan’s severed head were posted on social media.
History
repeated itself four years later when Azerbaijan launched yet another
aggressive war against Artsakh. The war halted after 44 days as a
result of the Russia-brokered agreement imposed on Armenia. According
to the agreement, there would be “an exchange of prisoners of war and
other detained persons and bodies of the dead.” However, Azerbaijan
still illegally holds and abuses many Armenian prisoners of war.
According
to a letter dated December 3, 2021, by the permanent representative of
Armenia to the United Nations addressed to the secretary-general:
Dozens of video and photo materials have been circulating in social
media illustrating the violent and inhuman treatment of those captured
– beheadings or mutilations, killings and other violence towards
servicemen and civilians, including the execution by Azerbaijani forces
in Hadrut region of the Republic of Artsakh of two captured Armenians.
In
addition, 38 civilians, citizens of the Republic of Artsakh, mainly
elderly, remained in villages that came under the control of Azerbaijan
were killed through physical violence, stabbing, beheading, close-range
shot, and other direct means. In fact, all the civilians who did not
leave their homes in territories which fell under Azerbaijan’s control
were killed.
The
letter added that those “Armenian servicemen and civilians who survived
inhuman treatment and were acknowledged by Azerbaijan were convicted to
or are facing imprisonment in Azerbaijan under unfounded accusations.”
By cutting off the gas pipeline to the population of Artsakh, firing at
residents frequently, and still illegally holding Armenian prisoners of
war in its jails, the Azerbaijani government appears to aim to
ethnically cleanse the region of indigenous Armenians by destroying
their peaceful life and violently forcing them to flee their ancestral
lands.
“The
targeting of civilian communities by Azerbaijan is an encroachment on
the rights of the civilian population, first of all against the right
to life. The criminal actions of Azerbaijan aim to intimidate, create
an atmosphere of fear and despair among the population of Artsakh,”
Stepanyan wrote on his Twitter account on January 11.
Would
it not be a fresh and pleasant change if Western governments finally
stepped up and took concrete action to stop Azerbaijan’s murderous
violence against the peaceful residents of Artsakh?
Turkish
al-Qaeda group operating out of Azerbaijan led by IHH charity founder
November 9,
2020
Nordicmonitor.com
A Turkish
al-Qaeda cell operating in Azerbaijan was led by the head of a Turkish-Azeri
business association and founder of controversial charity group the Foundation
for Human Rights and Freedoms and Humanitarian Relief (IHH), which has links to
Turkish intelligence agency MIT, a Nordic Monitor investigation has found.
According to a
review of court documents, Hüseyin Büyükfırat, former IHH representative for the
Caucasus, had run the operations of the IHH under the pretense of charitable
work while keeping in contact with a Turkish al-Qaeda group called Tahşiyeciler. Turkish law enforcement kept tabs on Büyükfırat and was wiretapping his phone when he spoke
to indicted al-Qaeda group leader Mullah Muhammed (real name: Mehmet Doğan) about plans and funds transfers.
Büyükfırat, 48, is one of the
founders of the IHH and had represented the charity group in the Caucasus
between 1994 and 2000. Although he later left the official position with the
IHH and set up a chain of local stores in Azerbaijan, Büyükfırat
kept working for the IHH in an unofficial capacity. He often used the code
names Abdurrahman and Abu Abrar. He was deported from Azerbaijan for radical
activities in 2003 but managed to return few years later.
A Turkish
prosecutor who had investigated Mullah Muhammed, a radical preacher who openly
called for armed jihad, declared his support for Osama bin Laden and urged the
beheading of Americans, listed the Baku-based Büyükfırat
as a suspect in his investigation. Authorities who monitored Mullah Muhammed’s
phone contacts identified Büyükfırat when the
two had phone conversations between May 15, 2009 and June 3, 2009 and talked
about transferring funds.
A judge
granted a wiretap authorization on June 8 authorizing the interception of
both Büyükfırat’s Turkish and Azeris GSM numbers
(+905327046154 and +994502165152). His emails ebuebrar@gmail.com and firatbf@gmail.com were
also monitored for six months. His home was searched on February 22, 2010 when
the police executed detention and search and seizure warrants issued by a judge
as part of the investigation into Mullah Muhammed’s group.
Facing an
outstanding arrest warrant, Büyükfırat stayed
away from Turkey for eight months and eventually decided to come through the
land border from Syria instead of flying directly to Istanbul from Baku. He
traveled to Iran by land and used the Syrian-Turkish border to enter Turkey.
The police detained Büyükfırat in the border
province of Şanlıurfa and referred him for
arraignment in a Diyarbakır court. The chief
public prosecutor in Diyarbakır was a family
friend of Büyükfırat, and he was released
pending trial.
Büyükfırat’s clan has long maintained
a relationship with radical preacher Mullah Muhammed, and both Büyükfırat’s father Mehmet and his brother attended
Mullah Muhammed’s study circles. They also financed the operations of the Tahşiyeciler group. According to a report by the
Financial Crimes Investigation Board (MASAK) dated July 26, 2010, Büyükfırat personally provided funding to the group at
the time. The court records indicate that Büyükfırat
transferred some 2 million Turkish lira for Tahşiyeciler
operations.
Büyükfırat went to Azerbaijan as a
young man in 1992 and has been living there ever since. He runs various
business enterprises, from food and medicine to paper and construction. He
currently owns an eponymously named restaurant chain. He set up the Union of
Muslim Students (Müslüman Talebeler
Birliği) and had served as the Caucasus
representative of Turkish political Islam grassroots organization Milli Görüş (National View). In his own words, he was
personally appointed to this position by Necmettin Erbakan, the founder of
political Islam in Turkey and formerly a mentor to current Turkish President
Recep Tayyip Erdoğan.
When the
police rounded up Mullah Muhammed and his associates in February 2009, Büyükfırat was in Azerbaijan and remained at large for
eight months. His brother Reşit Büyükfırat, deputy chairman of the provincial health
commission in Şanlıurfa, was detained.
When the
police detained Tahşiyeciler leader Mullah
Muhammed and his associates in January 2010, the police discovered three hand
grenades, one smoke bomb, seven handguns, 18 hunting rifles, electronic parts
for explosives, knives and a large cache of ammunition in the homes of the
suspects.
The
investigation revealed how Mullah Muhammed had asked his followers to build
bombs and mortars in their homes, urged the decapitation of Americans, claiming
that the religion allowed such practices. “I’m telling you to take up your guns
and kill them,” he said in recorded sermons, adding, “If the sword is not used,
then this is not Islam.” According to Mullah Muhammed, all Muslims were
obligated to respond to then-al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden’s armed fight.
In a wiretap
recorded on June 3, 2009 at 14:13 hours, Mullah Muhammed asked for 1.2 million
Turkish lira (some $780,000 at the exchange rate in
effect at the time) from Büyükfırat, who was in
Adana province. Mullah Muhammed said the funds were needed in a couple of days
and that he had accumulated a large amount of debt. Büyükfırat
responded that he would consider Mullah Muhammed wishes an order. When the
wiretap was presented to Mullah Muhammed during questioning by the police,
he denied having the conversation, while Büyükfırat
claimed it was part of a business deal with his brother.
In a wiretap
dated May 21, 2009 Büyükfırat informed
Mullah Muhammed about new recruits in Azerbaijan and told him Mullah Muhammed‘s first book had been translated into Azeri
and would soon be published in Russian. Büyükfırat
kept the phone conversation cryptic and said he was involved in “major stuff
that is important.” Mullah Muhammed prayed for him and added that “Allah
will clear your path.” During police questioning, Mullah Muhammed denied
knowing Büyükfırat, although Büyükfırat
admitted he knew him well and described him as a close family cleric.
Although
Mullah Muhammed and his associates were indicted and tried, Erdoğan
started defending the group in 2014, vouching for the radical imam. The
campaign to save the indicted Mullah Muhammed was first launched by the Sabah
daily, owned by Erdoğan’s family, on March 13,
2014. An article tried to portray Mullah Muhammed as a victim. The government
claimed that Mullah Muhammed was framed by the Gülen
movement, a group that is highly critical of Erdoğan
on a range of issues from corruption to Turkey’s arming of jihadist groups in
Syria and Libya.
In the end Erdoğan helped secure Mullah Muhammed and his
associates’ acquittal through his loyalist judges and prosecutors, launched a
crackdown on journalists who criticized his radical group and even hired a
lawyer to file a civil suit in the US against Muslim scholar Fethullah Gülen, who has been an outspoken critic of radical and jihadist
groups, for defaming this fanatic. The Bakirköy 3rd
High Criminal Court acquitted all suspects including Mullah Muhammed of
al-Qaeda charges on December 15, 2015. In a contradiction of past reports
about Tahşiyeciler, the Security General Directorate
(Emniyet) also issued a new report whitewashing the
activities of the group.
The veteran
police chiefs who had investigated Tahşiyeciler
were dismissed and later jailed on fabricated charges of defaming the al-Qaeda
group and its leader. Büyükfırat was listed as a
complainant in the new case launched against the police chiefs who were
involved in the investigation of Mullah Muhammed and journalists who wrote
critically about the group.
In a hearing
held on August 16, 2016 Ali Fuat Yılmazer, former head of the police
intelligence section that specialized in radical religious groups, testified
that “the IHH campaigns are designed to provide aid for jihadists engaged
in global terrorism around the world and supply medical aid, funding,
logistics and human resources for jihadists. This man [Büyükfırat]
is at the center of one of the most important jihadist regions, which is
Chechnya, a place that comes to mind first with respect to global terrorism.”
The police
chief added that he personally submitted detailed reports about the IHH’s
terror links to Erdoğan when he was prime
minister. “I also provided very comprehensive reports to the prime minister on
this issue at the time. These reports are also filed in the archives of
the [Turkish] state. It [the IHH] is one of the leading organizations when it
comes to al-Qaeda activities in the world,” he said in court.
Presiding judge
Canel Ruzgar did not like
what he heard from the police intelligence chief and said he could not level
accusations against Büyükfırat, who was listed
as a complainant in the defamation case against him.
The IHH had
long been flagged by Russia as an organization that smuggled arms to jihadist
groups in Syria, according to intelligence documents submitted to the UN
Security Council on Feb. 10, 2016. Russian intelligence documents even
furnished the license plate numbers of trucks dispatched by the IHH loaded with
arms and supplies bound for al-Qaeda-affiliated groups including the Nusra
Front.
The leaked
emails of Berat Albayrak, the son-in-law of President
Erdoğan and current finance and treasury
minister, also implicated the IHH in arming Libyan factions. The secret
document found in leaked emails tells the story of how the owner of a bankrupt
shipping and container company asked for compensation from the Turkish government
for damage his ship sustained while transporting arms between Libyan ports at
the order of Turkish authorities in 2011. The document revealed all the details
of a Turkish government-approved arms shipment to rebels in a ship contracted
by the IHH.
The Erdoğan government helped save the IHH from legal
troubles in Turkey while mobilizing resources and diplomatic clout to back the
IHH in global operations.
In the
meantime, Büyükfırat managed to escape criminal
charges in Turkey thanks to the Erdoğan
government’s intervention in the case and continues to operate in both Turkey
and Azerbaijan. He did not even bother to show up for his trial at the Şanlıurfa 2nd High Criminal Court and did not
respond to a warrant issued by a judge, who ordered him to appear at the
hearing. He is currently head of the Turkey-Azerbaijan Businessmen’s and
Industrialists Union (Türkiye-Azerbaycan İş Adamları ve Sanayiciler Birliği or TUIB), an organization set up by Turkish
businesspeople in Azerbaijan. He works closely with the Turkish Embassy in
Baku.
Mullah
Muhammed is also free to continue expanding his radical network. In the
meantime, Yakup Ergun, the police intelligence
officer who drafted reports about the jihadist activities of Büyükfırat as part of the counterterrorism
investigation, was removed from his job by the Erdoğan
government and later fired.
A Regime Conceals Its Erasure of Indigenous
Armenian Culture
A groundbreaking forensic report tracks
Azerbaijan’s recent destruction of 89 medieval churches, 5,840 intricate
cross-stones, and 22,000 tombstones.
Simon Maghakyan and
Sarah Pickman
February 18, 2019
HyperAllergic.com
In April 2011, when a US Ambassador traveled to Azerbaijan, on the southwestern
edge of the former USSR, he was denied access to the riverside borderland that
separates this South Caucasus nation from Iran. But it was not a foreign foe
that halted the visit. Instead, his Azerbaijani hosts insisted that the envoy’s
planned investigation inside the Azerbaijani exclave of Nakhichevan
(officially, Naxçıvan Autonomous Republic) could
not proceed because it was motivated by fake news. The ambassador had intended
to probe the reported destruction of thousands of historical Medieval Christian
Armenian artworks and objects at the necropolis of Djulfa
in Nakhichevan. This cemetery is recorded to have once boasted the world’s
largest collection of khachkars — distinctive Armenian cross-stones. However,
according to Azerbaijani officials this reported destruction was a farce, that
the site had not been disturbed, because it never existed in the first place.
Despite ample testimony to the contrary, Azerbaijan claims that Nakhichevan was
never Armenian.
Incompatible narratives of historical rights
and wrongs have long bedeviled the unresolved Armenian-Azerbaijani conflict.
Following the Russian Empire’s WWI-era collapse, Armenia and Azerbaijan emerged
as short-lived independent states. Since centuries of imperial warfare over the
strategic Armenian Highland had diversified the region’s ethnic makeup,
newly-independent Armenia and Azerbaijan confronted overlapping territorial
claims. Soon after the Bolsheviks took power in the area, they formalized two
disputed regions — Nagorno-Karabakh and Nakhichevan — as autonomies within Soviet
Azerbaijan.While Nagorno-Karabakh preserved a
majority Armenian population, Nakhichevan’s longstanding Armenian communities
dwindled over the twentieth century. In 1988, Nagorno-Karabakh sought
unification with Soviet Armenia. Leaving Azerbaijan was necessary,
Nagorno-Karabakh’s majority-Armenian population claimed, to preserve the
region’s indigenous Christian past and to avoid the fate of Nakhichevan’s
vanished Armenians. Amid Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev’s glasnost and
perestroika, Nagorno-Karabakh became a war zone.
Since the 1994 ceasefire among
newly-independent Armenia, Azerbaijan, and Nagorno-Karabakh, mutual accusations
of vandalism and revisionism have been rampant. Azerbaijan’s president proteststhat “all of our mosques in occupied Azerbaijani
lands have been destroyed.” A visitor to Armenia-backed Nagorno-Karabakh (also
called Artsakh in Armenian) would observe otherwise: there are mosques, albeit
nonoperational, including one in the devastated “buffer zone” ghost town Agdam.
Yet a tourist in Nakhichevan, which was not a
war zone, would encounter neither Armenian heritage sites nor public
acknowledgment of the region’s far-reaching Armenian roots, including the
medieval global trade networks launched by Djulfa’s
innovative merchants. These merchants’ legacies, documented in Sebouh Aslanian’s From the Indian
Ocean to the Mediterranean, include the legendary treasures of the “Adventure
Prize” ship pirated in 1698 by celebrated outlaw Captain Kidd. In addition,
according to Ina McCabe’s Orientalism in Early Modern France, many of Europe’s
first cafés were founded by these Djulfa (Julfan) merchants in the seventeenth century — contributing
to a culture that, as Adam Gopnik writes in The New Yorker’s last issue of
2018, “helped lay the foundation for the liberal Enlightenment.” Save for
appropriated Armenian folklore linking the region to the Biblical Noah, whose
ark was said to have landed on nearby Mount Ararat, Nakhichevan’s Armenian past
has all but been erased.
Photographic Memories
Unlike the self-publicized cultural destruction
of ISIS, independent Azerbaijan’s covert campaign to re-engineer Nakhichevan’s
historical landscape between 1997 and 2006 is little known outside the region.
But one man, Armenia-based researcher Argam Ayvazyan,
anticipated the systematic destruction decades before.
Ayvazyan feared that Nakhichevan’s Armenian
material heritage was destined to disappear, like its indigenous Armenians
already had. The region’s Armenian population shrunk following the 1921
treaties of Kars and Moscow, in which Turkish negotiators secured the disputed
territory as an exclave under the administration of Soviet Azerbaijan. Ayvazyan
was barely 17 when he started photographing the cultural heritage of his native
Nakhichevan. From 1964 to 1987, he collected enough documentation to ultimately
publish 200 articles and over 40 books. His photographic missions were
self-financed, undercover, dangerous, and supported by his closest companion:
“My wife, a teacher, was my number one pillar,” recalls Ayvazyan, “she never
once complained about my prolonged absences, financial hardships, or being our
children’s primary caretaker.” By the time the Berlin Wall fell, Ayvazyan had
documented 89 Armenian churches, 5,840 ornate khachkars, and 22,000 horizontal
tombstones, among other Armenian monuments. His affection for Nakhichevan’s
artifacts was not confined to Christian sites: Ayvazyan also surveyed the
region’s seven Islamic mausoleums and 27 mosques.
Treading carefully while researching
contentious sites is a skill Ayvazyan learned early in his work. In 1965, after
being taken to a police station for photographing a church near his birthplace,
Ayvazyan received a warning from a visiting KGB chief, who treated the teenage
offender to tea. In a recent interview with the authors, Ayvazyan recalled that
Comrade Heydar Aliyev told him in Russian, “Never again do such things, there
are no Armenian-Shmarmenian things here!” Four years
later, Comrade Aliyev would become Soviet Azerbaijan’s leader and then, in
1993, president of independent Azerbaijan. “Who knew,” Ayvazyan tells
Hyperallergic, “that the man who told me not to photograph churches would 30
years later launch their annihilation.” Ayvazyan became increasingly cautious.
For example, when it came to surveying the interior of Nakhichevan’s preeminent
cathedral in the town of Agulis in September 1972, he
asked an elderly local matriarch, Marus, to escort
him to a potentially hostile encounter. As the last Armenian resident of a
nearby village, she knew how to speak softly with the Azerbaijani community of Agulis. There, Marus convinced
locals to unlock the sealed Saint Thomas cathedral, which tradition states was
founded as a chapel by Bartholomew the Apostle. Marus
insisted that Ayvazyan was suffering from an illness that, he believed, could
only be eased by solitary time spent inside the cathedral.
Post-Communist Manifesto
In August 2005 the region’s authorities
detained another visiting scholar. Scottish researcher Steven Sim had traveled
to post-Soviet Nakhichevan to assess the condition of the Armenian churches
photographed earlier by Ayvazyan. Instead of medieval churches, Sim found
vacant plots with no vegetation. His police interrogators had a quick response
as to why there was nothing for Sim to study: “Armenians came here and took
photographs … then went back to their country and inserted into them
photographs of churches in Armenia … There were no Armenians ever living here —
so how could there have been churches here?!,” he was told. At the end of the
interrogation, Sim was given until midnight to exit Nakhichevan, leaving with
photographs of empty lots. But at least some of the toppled headstones of Djulfa, which he had seen from his window during a train
ride, were still there. Because of its prominent location on an international
border, Djulfa — spelled varyingly and originating
from the Armenian “Jugha” — had survived.
Four months later, in December 2005, an Iranian
border patrol alerted the Prelate of Northern Iran’s Armenian Church that the
vast Djulfa cemetery, visible across the border in
Azerbaijan, was under military attack. Bishop Nshan Topouzian and his driver rushed to video tapeover 100 Azerbaijani soldiers, armed with
sledgehammers, dump trucks, and cranes, destroying the cemetery’s remaining
2,000 khachkars; over 1,000 had already been purged in 1998 and 2002.
The helpless bishop officiated a tearful
memorial service for the disturbed dead as the heart-wrenching scenes and
screeching sounds of the obliteration continued across the border. Photographs
from 2006 taken from the Iranian side of the border showed that a military
rifle range had been erected where the cemetery used to be, presumably by
Azerbaijan’s armed forces, to rationalize the existence of the freshly
flattened soil. Likely due to three factors — its noticeable position on an
international border, reputation as the world’s largest collection of
khachkars, and previously voiced Armenian concerns for its preservation — Djulfa was the last major Armenian site in Nakhichevan to
be destroyed. Its 2005–2006 demolition was the “grand finale” of Azerbaijan’s
eradication of Nakhichevan’s Armenian past.
Since Azerbaijan banned international
fact-finders from visiting Nakhichevan, the American Association for the
Advancement of Science (AAAS) employed remote sensing technologies in its
pioneer investigation into cultural destruction. Their 2010 geospatial study
concluded that “satellite evidence is consistent with reports by observers on
the ground who have reported the destruction of Armenian artifacts in the Djulfa cemetery.” In November 2013, dressed in the guise of
a pilgrim to a Djulfa chapel now preserved on the
Iranian side of the border, one of the authors of this article saw desolate
grasslands across the river in Azerbaijan. The breathtakingly ornate stones of
the world’s largest medieval Armenian cemetery were no more. Except for the
peculiarity of flat fields on otherwise uneven terrain, it was as if no human
had ever touched the landscape, just as Azerbaijani leaders intended.
Rebuttal by Baku
“Absolutely false and slanderous information …
[fabricated by] the Armenian lobby.” These were the words used by Azerbaijan’s
president Ilham Aliyev — successor to and son of KGB-leader-turned-President
Heydar Aliyev — to describe reports of Djulfa’s
destruction in an April 2006 speech. Dismissing any criticism as “Armenian
propaganda” has been commonplace in Azerbaijan since war gripped South Caucasus
in the early 1990s. By the time a fragile Armenian-Azerbaijani ceasefire was
signed in 1994, this conflict — the Nagorno-Karabakh war — had scarred the
wider region. It caused tens of thousands of deaths on both sides and many more
displaced refugees, the majority of whom were Azerbaijanis from surrounding
territories that the otherwise island-shaped Nagorno-Karabakh considers its
existential guarantee. “After its defeat and suffering at the hands of the
Armenians,” reflected Black Garden author Thomas de Waal on Azerbaijan’s
post-war rhetoric, which came to include denial of the WWI-era Armenian
Genocide, “[Baku] wanted to assert Azerbaijan’s right to victimhood too.”
Azerbaijan’s narrative includes Armenian aggression, ethnic cleansing, massacre
in Khojaly, occupation, and anti-Azerbaijan propaganda spread by the
well-connected Armenian Diaspora.
But historical revisionism in Azerbaijan
challenging Armenian antiquity predates the bloody 1990s war by decades. In the
mid-1950s, writes Victor Schnirelmann in the
Russian-language book Memory Wars, Azerbaijani historiographers initiated an anti-Armenian
agenda. Such a shift likely occurred in response to the rebellious cultural
awakening in Armenia, which, as Armenian-American scholar Pietro Shakarian argues, was among the first Soviet republics to
experience the “Thaw” and de-Stalinization. Each new argument of the
anti-Armenian revisionism, writes Schnirelmann,
“inflamed the imagination of the Azerbaijani authors.” In 1975, for instance, a
Soviet Azerbaijani construction project demolished the ancient Holy Trinity
church, the site of Arab invaders’ mass burning of Armenian noblemen in 705 CE.
At the time of the demolition, Azerbaijani historian Ziya
Bunyadov downplayed the destruction. Wrecking the
church was insignificant since the “real” Holy Trinity, Bunyadov
abruptly claimed, was located outside Azerbaijan. A decade later, as the Soviet
Union was crumbling, Azerbaijani historians claimed that the churches and
cross-stones of Nakhichevan were not the work of medieval Armenians but that of
long-gone “Caucasian Albanians,” whom many Azerbaijanis consider to be
ancestors, even though the extinct nation’s geographic distribution never
included Nakhichevan. But, after the region’s last remaining traces of
Christianity were expunged in 2005–2006, the Azerbaijani authorities abandoned
discussions of “Caucasian Albanians,” and began promoting Nakhichevan as the
bedrock of an “ancient and medieval Turkish-Islamic culture,” without reference
to its deep Christian past.
Despite fervent denial, the most gripping
evidence of the erasure of Nakhichevan’s Armenian heritage comes from within
the Azerbaijani government itself. On December 6, 2005, days before Djulfa’s catastrophic destruction, Nakhichevan’s local
autocrat Vasif Talibov, a
relative of President Aliyev, issued public decree No. 5-03/S, ordering a
detailed inventory of Nakhichevan’s monuments. Three years later, the
investigation was summed up in the bilingual English and Azerbaijani
Encyclopedia of Nakhchivan Monuments, co-edited by Talibov himself. Missing from the 522-page “Encyclopedia”
are the 89 medieval churches, 5,840 intricate khachkars, and 22,000 tombstones
that Ayvazyan had meticulously documented. There is not so much as a footnote
on the now-defunct Christian Armenian communities in the area — Apostolic and
Catholic alike. Nevertheless, the official Azerbaijani publication’s foreword
explicitly reveals “Armenians” as the reason for No. 5-03/S: “Thereafter the
decision issued on 6 December 2005 … a passport was issued for each monument …
Armenians demonstrating hostility against us not only have an injustice [sic]
land claim from Nakhchivan, but also our historical
monuments by giving biassed [sic] information to the
international community. The held investigations once again prove that the land
of Nakhchivan belonged to the Azerbaijan turks [sic]….”
Azerbaijan’s government has also not shied away
from reinventing long-lost Armenian monuments as “ancient Azerbaijani”
landmarks. In 2009, Nakhichevan’s authorities unveiled a new Islamic mausoleum
as “the restored eighth-century grave monument of the Prophet Noah” in what was
once an Armenian cemetery. In fact, the original mythological tomb, likely
dynamited during Stalinist purges against “religious superstition,” was
described by J. Theodore Bent in The Contemporary Review in 1896 as a popular
Christian Armenian shrine, although other observers have reported that Muslims,
too, considered the site sacred. Similarly, a construction project completed in
2016 over the ruins of the hilltop castle Ernjak was
promoted as “the restored Alinja fortress — the
Machu-Picchu of Azerbaijan,” with no reference to its deep Armenian past. This
includes the 914 CE torture, beheading, and crucifixion of Armenia’s king Smbat the Martyr at the hands of the Abbasid caliphate’s
Sajid emir Yusuf during his siege of the castle, chronicled by contemporary
Catholicos Hovhannes V.
Today, Nakhichevan’s sole “surviving” Christian
site is what the Azerbaijani authorities call the “Ordubad Temple,” the former
St. Alexander Nevsky Russian Orthodox Church that,
according to Argam Ayvazyan, was built in 1862 by the
Araskhanians, a prominent Armenian clan from Agulis. In 2016, after a “renovation” that significantly
altered the original structure, the Azerbaijani authorities reopened the
formerly Russian church as a “temple-museum” to, in part, use its interior for
displaying photos of nearby Islamic monuments, followed by Azerbaijan’s state
media’s praise of the conversion as a testament to “multiculturalism and
tolerance.” St. Nevsky’s Armenian masons are not
acknowledged by the Azerbaijani authorities since, according to their preferred
history, Armenians did not exist in Nakhichevan.
Costly Conscience
It is not just Armenians who have been affected
by Azerbaijan’s government-sanctioned destruction in Nakhichevan. Affirming
Nakhichevan’s Armenian roots is dangerous for Azerbaijanis as well, no matter
how prominent. In 2013, President Aliyev was furious at Azerbaijan’s prolific
“People’s Writer” — Akram Aylisli
— for publishing a novel about Armenian suffering and antiquity. Set during the
Soviet twilight, the protagonist of Stone Dreams is an Azerbaijani intellectual
from Agulis (known today as Aylis),
an ancient Armenian town in Nakhichevan that its worldly Armenian merchants had
modernized into a “Little Paris,” well before Ottoman Turks — aided by
Azerbaijani opportunists — massacred its Armenian community in 1919. The
novel’s protagonist constantly grapples with memories of this place, including
eight of the town’s 12 medieval churches that had survived until the 1990s, even
after falling into coma while protecting a victim of anti-Armenian pogroms in
Azerbaijan’s capital Baku. Riled by what he called the “deliberate distortion”
of history in Stone Dreams, President Aliyev revoked Aylisli’s
pension and title of “People’s Writer.” Aylisli’s
writings were removed from school curricula, his books were publicly burned,
and his family members were fired from their jobs. A group of international
intellectuals later nominated Aylisli for the Nobel
Peace Prize.
Aylisli, who has been under de
facto house arrest since Stone Dreams’s release,
protested Azerbaijan’s destruction of Nakhichevan’s Armenian past for many
years. He reportedly witnessed the destruction of Agulis’s
churches and quit his position as Member of Azerbaijan’s Parliament in protest
of the late 2005 demolition of Djulfa. It is often
said that Aylisli decided to write Stone Dreams upon
watching a video of Djulfa’s destruction. But a newly
released book reveals that Aylisli first protested
the destruction in Nakhichevan nearly a decade earlier. In a recently penned
essay published as part of Farewell, Aylis: A
Non-Traditional Novel in Three Works (English translation by Katherine E.
Young, 2018), Aylisli writes that “I always openly
expressed to [Vasif Talibov]
that I thought the mass destruction of Armenian monuments in Nakhchivan was a great shame of our nation.” Aylisli’s new essay also references a telegram he sent to
Azerbaijan’s president in 1997, the year “when that monstrous vandalism had
just begun.” Aylisili had actually published the text
of this telegram in 2011 in a privately released Russian-language book with a
circulation of just 50 copies. The telegram reads:
To the President of the Republic of Azerbaijan
– Mr. HEYDAR ALIYEV
Honorable Mr. President
Recently it became known to me that in my
native village of Aylis large-scale work is underway
for the eradication of Armenian churches and cemeteries. This act of vandalism
is being perpetrated through the involvement of armed forces and employment of
anti-tank mines. I bring to your attention my deepest concern regarding the
fact that such senseless action will be perceived by the world community as
manifestation of disrespect for religious and moral values, and I express my
hope that urgent measures will be undertaken on your part for ending this evil
vandalism.
Respectfully,
AKRAM AYLISLI
10 June, 1997
Following Ilham Aliyev’s persecution of the
famed author in light of the public release of Stone Dreams, independent
Russian journalist Shura Burtin interviewed Akram Aylisli in 2013 in Baku.
Awed by Aylisli’s nostalgia for his birthplace, the
Russian journalist traveled to Nakhichevan to see the area with his own eyes.
Recounting his 2013 visit to Agulis, Burtin recently told Hyperallergic that he didn’t see “a
trace of the area’s glorious past.” Burtin did not
mince words to describe what he saw (or rather, didn’t see): “not even ISIS
could commit such an epic crime against humanity.”
Different Diagnoses
Outside observers have typically interpreted
the Aliyev regime’s erasure of Nakhichevan’s Armenian Christian heritage solely
as a vengeful legacy of the bloody Nagorno-Karabakh war, but Armenian scholars
and Azerbaijani dissidents have several additional theories of their own.
Armenian researcher Samvel Karapetyan,
whose diligent documentation of remote medieval Armenian monuments in
Nagorno-Karabakh has been dubbed “constructive ultra-nationalism,” sees
Azerbaijan’s destruction of Armenian monuments as an effort to neutralize
Armenian “historical rights” or antiquity-derived political legitimacy in the
region. Other Armenian scholars perceive Azerbaijan’s anti-Armenian destruction
as part of a larger agenda of realizing a vision of pan-Turkism: an ethnically
homogenous Turkic polity comprising Turkey, Azerbaijan, and their
ethnolinguistic brethren across Eurasia. In the words of the late Armenian
historian Edward Danielyan, “[Azerbaijan’s] monstrous
crimes [against medieval Armenian monuments] are not a clash of civilizations
or cultures, but a continuation of the [1915–23] genocide stemming from
Pan-Turkism’s anti-Armenian policies.”
Perceiving parallels between the obliteration
in Nakhichevan and the destruction of material heritage during the Armenian
Genocide in Turkey is not without merit. The pre-WWI count of active Ottoman
Armenian churches and monasteries, according to the Armenian Patriarchate of
Constantinople, was 2,538 and 451, respectively; nearly all have since been destroyed
or repurposed. As French journalists Laure Marchand and Guillaume Perrier
explain in Turkey and the Armenian Ghost, “Since the Armenians’ religious
heritage was the strongest expression of their ancestral roots, it became a
prime target for their oppressors.” In absolute numbers, Turkey’s wipeout of
Armenian cultural heritage dwarfs Azerbaijan’s recent vandalism in Nakhichevan.
Nevertheless, many Armenian ruins — and a few renovated churches — do survive
today across historical Armenia’s western regions in what is today Eastern
Turkey. In contrast, Azerbaijan has left no Armenian stone unturned in
Nakhichevan.
Unlike Armenian scholars, Azerbaijani
dissidents often see the destruction of Nakhichevan’s Armenian heritage as part
of a domestic crackdown on all forms of opposition to Azerbaijan’s ruling
elite. This repression seemingly intensified after the May 2005 inauguration of
the lucrative Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan oil pipeline. Vasif
Talibov authorized decree No. 5-03/S, the effective
order for erasing the last remnants of Armenian Nakhichevan, just months after
the Europe-bound pipeline’s opening. But Talibov’s
entourage did not just attack khachkars. They also shutdown most of the
region’s numerous privately-owned teahouses, the traditional center of Azerbaijani
social life, where discussing politics was as commonplace as indulging in hot
tea. Simultaneously, Talibov has been unveiling
mosques and statues honoring the ruling dynasty’s patriarch Heydar Aliyev.
According to Netherlands-based independent Azerbaijani historian and prominent
human rights defender Arif Yunus,
who was previously jailed in Azerbaijan on what Amnesty International considers
trumped-up charges of “treason,” the Azerbaijani president’s anti-Armenian
posture is inflated jingoism aimed at cementing his regime. “After replacing
his father in 2003 as president,” Yunus told us,
“Ilham Aliyev upgraded Armenophobia to the levels of fascist Germany’s
anti-Semitism.” The final purge of Nakhichevan’s medieval Armenian monuments,
according to Yunus, was conceived by Ilham Aliyev to
boost his nationalist credentials, while Vasif Talibov happily complied to remain in charge.
While some Azerbaijanis have embraced their
government’s vandalism as either righteous revenge or a national security
measure against potential Armenian territorial claims, other Azerbaijanis — in
addition to the humanist author Akram Aylisli — have mourned the destruction. According to an
Azerbaijani historian, who requested anonymity, many among modern Nakhichevan’s
almost half-million population (virtually all of whom are Muslim), are
devastated by the recent disappearance of the area’s Christian heritage. This
includes teachers who took students on field trips to those sites. However,
“they prefer silent rage over jail time.” Aylisli’s
2018 non-fiction essay in Farewell, Aylis even claims
that a mosque built five years ago on the site of one of the destroyed churches
has been boycotted by locals because “everyone in Aylis
knows that prayers offered in a mosque built in the place of a church don’t
reach the ears of Allah.”
Multiculturalists, Not Vandals
President Aliyev has harsh critics among
Azerbaijani intellectuals and the global human rights community, but he also
has passionate supporters abroad. In fact, the Aliyev regime’s
controversy-riddled diplomacy promotes Azerbaijan as a “land of tolerance.” In
2012, the European Stability Initiative described Azerbaijan’s generous
spending on lobbying and attempts to woo foreign allies as “caviar diplomacy.”
This petrodollar-funded campaign has entailed various donations, including
cultural preservation grants of undisclosed sums to the Vatican. Baku’s ability
to court friendships has produced many notable results, including a 2015 Time
Magazine op-ed describing Azerbaijan as “an oasis of tolerance,” commendations
of Azerbaijan’s “exemplary interfaith harmony” in several US state
legislatures, and medals bestowed upon Azerbaijan’s Vice President — President
Aliyev’s wife — by the leaders of France, the Russian Orthodox Church, and even
UNESCO, the international organization charged with protecting world heritage.
The latter’s World Heritage Committee is scheduled to meetin
June 2019 in Baku, where President Aliyev’s token preservation of a repurposed
19th-century Armenian church (the age of which “proves” that Armenian history
inside Azerbaijan spans just a couple centuries) is a must-see “tolerance”
attraction.
UNESCO’s commendations of Azerbaijan have been
particularly puzzling. In 2013, following Washington’s defunding of UNESCO,
Azerbaijan donated $5 million to the cash-strapped organization. Praise for
Azerbaijan’s “multiculturalism” and “tolerance” soon ensued. Even before
Azerbaijan’s donations, UNESCO’s leaders had largely ignored the destruction in
Nakhichevan, despite documentation submitted by the Parliamentary Group
Switzerland-Armenia and Research on Armenian Architecture. Moreover, following
his 2009 retirement, UNESCO director-general Kōichirō
Matsuura joined Azerbaijan’s state-managed “Baku International Multiculturalism
Centre” as a trustee, while his successor Irina Bokova frequented Baku for
President Aliyev’s “World Forum on Intercultural Dialogue.” Allegations of foul
play lack hard evidence, however, perhaps except for The Guardian’s September
4, 2017 report “UK at centre of secret $3bn
Azerbaijani money laundering and lobbying scheme.” This investigative article
by Luke Harding, Caelainn Barr, and Dina Nagapetyants cited questionable payments to Bokova’s
husband. Ethical or not, the UNESCO-Azerbaijan rapport has undoubtedly
contributed to international silence over the destruction of Nakhichevan’s
Armenian past. But Baku’s UNESCO charm offensive, argues Aliyev critic Arif Yunus, also promotes
domestic obedience: “Nothing projects the Aliyev dictatorship’s power to
Azerbaijani dissidents like committing cultural genocide in Nakhichevan then
showering in international praises of tolerance.”
Pursuits of Justice
Unable to hold Azerbaijan accountable for the
purge of Nakhichevan’s Armenian cultural heritage, Armenians and their allies
have rethought what forms justice might take. In 2010, Armenia convinced a
multi-state UNESCO committee to declare “the symbolism and craftsmanship of
khachkars” part of UN-designated Intangible Cultural Heritage — a posthumous
yet implicit tribute to Djulfa.
Several replica Djulfa
khachkars have been erected across the world, including at the Council of
Europe headquarters in Strasbourg, France and the Colorado State Capitol in
Denver, US. The Australian Catholic University’s former Julfa
Cemetery Digital Repatriation Project, the brainchild of Judith Crispin, aimed
to virtually recreate Djulfa with 3D imaging
technologies. The Project was created in part “to demonstrate to those who
destroy world heritage that their efforts are in vain,” states digital
humanities specialist Harold Short. Yet remote restoration of Nakhichevan’s
lost Armenian monuments or alternative measures of accountability fall short of
unanimous approval. “The ultimate hope for in-situ reconstruction is
reconciliation,” explains Brian Daniels, the University of Pennsylvania’s
Cultural Heritage Center director. Daniels, who has testified before the US
Congress about issues of cultural destruction, notes that expert conservation
efforts must begin with at least some material remains, however small. But even
meeting this requirement would be “an extraordinary difficulty in Azerbaijan.”
Today, the scholar Argam
Ayvazyan — like all those of Armenian ethnicity and background — is banned by
Azerbaijan’s government from visiting his native Nakhichevan. Lamenting the
loss of the monuments he so lovingly documented for decades, he decries the
world’s silence. “Oil-rich Azerbaijan’s annihilation of Nakhichevan’s Armenian
past make it worse than ISIS, yet UNESCO and most Westerners have looked away.”
ISIS-demolished sites like Palmyra can be renovated, Ayvazyan argues, but “all
that remain of Nakhichevan’s Armenian churches and cross-stones that survived
earthquakes, caliphs, Tamerlane, and Stalin are my photographs.”
World watches in silence as Azerbaijan wipes
out Armenian culture
Western governments have failed to condemn the
destruction of a unique medieval cemetery by Azerbaijani soldiers
By Lucian Harris
Posted 25 May 2006
LONDON. A delegation of European members of Parliament was last month refused
access to Djulfa, in the Nakhichevan region of
Azerbaijan, to investigate reports that an ancient Armenian Christian cemetery
has been destroyed by Azerbaijani soldiers.
The delegation of ten MEPs from the commission on EU-Armenia parliamentary
co-operation travelled to Armenia on 17 April following a resolution passed by
the EP’s conference of presidents on 6 April. An EP spokesman told The Art
Newspaper that when the party tried to enter Nakhichevan, it was “opposed by
the Azerbaijan authorities”.
This was despite the Muslim country’s outright denial that the cemetery has
been destroyed—and despite the fact that Azerbaijan is a member of the Council
of Europe and thus committed to respecting cultural heritage.
According to witnesses, as quoted in Armenian reports, in a three-day operation
last December, Azerbaijani soldiers armed with sledgehammers obliterated the
remnants of the Djulfa cemetery (known as Jugha in Armenian). Until the early 20th century it
contained around 10,000 khachkars, dedicatory monuments unique to medieval
Armenian culture. They are typically carved with a cross surrounded by
intricate interlacing floral designs.
A great number of khachkars, the majority of which date from the 15th to 16th
centuries, were destroyed in 1903-04 during the construction of a railway, and
by the early 1970s only 2,707 were recorded.
Armenian culture has always had a precarious existence sandwiched between
Russia and the Islamic spheres of Turkey and Iran. The Armenians are still
fighting to get acknowledgement of the genocide of their people by the Ottoman
Turks which reached its peak in 1915. After 1921, when the southern enclaves of
Nakhichevan and Nagorno Karabakh were absorbed into Soviet Azerbaijan, many
Armenians fled the area and much of their cultural heritage was destroyed. By
the late 1980s when the Soviet Union crumbled, less than 4,000 Armenians
remained in Nakhichevan—so few that the exclave avoided the ethnic warfare that
exploded in Karabakh where a larger Armenian population remained under the
administration of Muslim Azerbaijan.
The Azerbaijani army began clearing the Jugha
cemetery in 1998, removing 800 of the khachkars before complaints by Unesco brought a temporary halt. But the destruction
commenced again in November 2002, and by the time the incident was written up
by Icomos in its World Report on Monuments and Sites
in Danger for that year, the 1500-year-old cemetery was described as
“completely flattened”. It is not clear exactly how many khachkars were left,
but on 14 December 2005, witnesses in Armenian reports said that soldiers had
demolished the remaining stones, loading them onto trucks and dumping them in
the river, actions that were filmed from across the river in Iran by an
Armenian Film crew, and aired on the Boston-based online television station Hairenik.
Armenians say the destruction of the Jugha cemetery
represents the final move in Azerbaijan’s systematic cleansing of Armenian
cultural heritage from Nakhichevan, mostly carried out between 1998 and 2002.
On a visit to Armenia in March, the director of the Hermitage Museum in St
Petersburg, Mikhail Piotrovsky, whose mother is
Armenian, reacted to the destruction by likening it to the Taleban’s
obliteration of the Bamiyan Buddhas. His comments elicited an angry response in
the Azerbaijani press. However, the lack of international condemnation of
Azerbaijan’s actions has been a source of frustration to many Armenians.
Baroness Cox, a long-standing campaigner for the protection of Armenian
heritage in Azerbaijan who has urged the British government to take action,
told The Art Newspaper that, despite the influential Armenian Diaspora, both
the US and UK administrations are more concerned with cultivating close
relations with oil-rich Azerbaijan and its ally Turkey, than with Armenia.
A response issued by the Embassy of Azerbaijan in Brussels in January, insisted
that Armenian allegations were made “to delude the international community” and
detract attention from “atrocities committed by the Armenian troops in the
occupied territories of Azerbaijan, where no single Azerbaijani monument has
been left undamaged”. It also contained an implied historical claim on the Jugha cemetery stating that it was not Armenian but created
by “Caucasian Albanians”.
The Azerbaijani allegations, which claim the destruction of hundreds of
mosques, religious schools, cemeteries and museums in the Shusha, Yerevan, Zangazur and Icmiadzin districts
of Armenia, have undoubtedly compounded the reluctance of international organisations to get involved in a situation described to
The Art Newspaper by Guido Carducci, the head of Unesco’s
International Standards Section, as “a political hot potato”.
According to Baroness Cox, even during the war, mosques in Armenia were
generally protected by the Christian population, but with so many emotive
claims and counter claims being made, and both sides accusing each other of
rewriting history, non-partisan monitoring and verification of all alleged
cultural crimes seems more important than ever. Speaking to The Art Newspaper,
Mikhail Piotrovsky said: “Any destruction of the
cultural heritage is a crime, whether that heritage be Armenian, Russian,
Azerbaijani, or Iraqi. The cultural heritage belongs to the entire world, not
just to one nation.”
Ayatollah issues fatwa
calling for two journalists in Azerbaijan to be killed
December 3, 2006
Reporters without borders
Reporters Without Borders
voiced deep concern today about a fatwa (religious decree) issued by an Iranian
ayatollah calling for two journalists in neighbouring
Azerbaijan to be killed for an allegedly blasphemous article. The fatwa’s
targets are Rafiq Nazar Oughlo
Taghizadh of the Azerbaijani fortnightly Sanat (“Industry”) and his editor Samir Sadaght
Oughlo.
“We urge the Iranian
authorities to calm people down as there has been a great deal of tension since
the publication of Mohammed cartoons in a Danish newspaper last February,” the
press freedom organisation said. “We also ask the
Azerbaijani authorities to do everything necessary to protect these two
journalists.”
Reporters Without Borders
added: “It is deeply shocking and completely unacceptable that religious
fundamentalists should call for the murder of two people who just expressed
their opinions.”
The offending article was
written by Taghizadh, 56, for the newspaper’s 6
November issue. Entitled “Europe and us,” its claim that European values were
superior to those of Muslim countries sparked outrage in both Azerbaijan (a Muslim
country) and Iran.
Fazel Lankarani
(photo), one of the Islamic Republic of Iran’s leading ayatollah’s, issued the
fatwa in response to appeals for advice from Azerbaijani Muslims. Posted on his
website (www.lankarani.org) on 25 November, it calls for both the “apostate”
journalist who wrote the article and the editor who published it to be killed.