Azerbaijan’s
Destruction of Armenian
Monuments
Exceeds ISIS Crimes
By Harut
Sassounian
Publisher,
The California Courier
www.TheCaliforniaCourier.com
“A
groundbreaking forensic report tracks Azerbaijan’s destruction of 89 medieval
churches, 5,480 intricate cross-stones, and 22,700 tombstones,” is the subtitle
of an incredible article by Simon Maghakyan and Sarah Pickman, published in the
Hyperallergic Newsletter last week. The article is titled: “A Regime Conceals
its Erasure of Indigenous Armenian Culture.”
In April
2011, when the US Ambassador to Azerbaijan wanted to visit Nakhichevan, an
Armenian territory classified by the Soviets as an “autonomous republic” of
Azerbaijan, to verify the destruction of thousands of historical medieval Armenian
khachkars (cross-stones), he was blocked by Azeri officials who told him that
reports of their destruction was fake news.
Under Azeri
oppression, the longstanding Armenian community of Nakhichevan had dwindled to
zero! Not content with ethnic-cleansing, the Azeris proceeded to eliminate all
traces of Armenian monuments, claiming that no Armenians had ever lived in
Nakhichevan.
“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
videotape over 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,” reported Maghakyan and Pickman.
The
flattened land, where the khachkars stood for centuries, is now a military
rifle range. The “demolition was the ‘grand finale’ of Azerbaijan’s eradication
of Nakhichevan’s Armenian past,” wrote the two authors.
Maghakyan
and Pickman reported that “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.’”
“Absolutely
false and slanderous information … [fabricated by] the Armenian lobby,”
proclaimed Azerbaijan’s President Ilham Aliyev, who makes frequent threats
against Armenia and distorts its history.
The authors
also quote from public decree No.5-03/S on December 6, 2005, by Nakhichevan’s
“local autocrat” Vasif Talibov, a relative of Pres. Aliyev, “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 [Armenian researcher Argam] 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]….’”
Any
Azerbaijani who dares to speak out in defense of Armenians is also attacked as
an enemy of Azerbaijan. A courageous Azerbaijani writer, Akram Aylisli, paid a
hefty price for telling the truth about the destruction of Armenian monuments
in his hometown of Agulis (known today as Aylis). The well-known novelist was
furious that the Azeri government was destroying Armenian churches. In his
novel, “Stone Dreams,” the protagonist, an intellectual from Agulis, refers to
memories of the town’s eight of the 12 medieval churches that had survived
until the 1990’s, and protects a victim of anti-Armenian pogroms in
Azerbaijan’s capital Baku. Pres. Aliyev revoked Aylisli’s pension and title of
“People’s Writer.” His writings were removed from school curricula, his books
were publicly burned, and his family members were fired from their jobs. He has
been under de facto house arrest since the release of his novel. Aylisli protested
the destruction of the Armenian churches in Agulis and resigned from his
position as Member of Azerbaijan’s Parliament. He fearlessly sent a telegram to
Pres. Heydar Aliyev in 1997, calling the destruction of the Armenian churches
in Aylis an “act of vandalism being perpetrated through the involvement of
armed forces and employment of anti-tank mines.”
The two
authors spoke with Russian journalist Shura Burtin who after interviewing
Aylisli in 2013 traveled to Nakhichevan and reported that he didn’t see “a
trace of the area’s glorious past.” Burtin concluded: “Not even ISIS could
commit such an epic crime against humanity.”
The authors
reported that Aylisli’s 2018 non-fiction essay in Farewell, claimed “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.’”
Argam
Ayvazyan, a native of Nakhichevan who spent decades photographing the local
Armenian monuments before their destruction, was quoted by Maghakyan and
Pickman as decrying 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 argued, but “all that remain of Nakhichevan’s Armenian churches and
cross-stones that survived earthquakes, caliphs, Tamerlane, and Stalin are my
photographs.”
