{"id":663442,"date":"2019-02-26T20:40:28","date_gmt":"2019-02-26T17:40:28","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/tr\/content\/?p=663442"},"modified":"2022-11-29T12:45:59","modified_gmt":"2022-11-29T09:45:59","slug":"azerbaijans-destruction-of-armenian-monuments-exceeds-isis-crimes","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/2019\/02\/26\/azerbaijans-destruction-of-armenian-monuments-exceeds-isis-crimes\/","title":{"rendered":"Azerbaijan\u2019s Destruction of Armenian Monuments Exceeds ISIS Crimes"},"content":{"rendered":"
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\u201cA groundbreaking forensic report tracks Azerbaijan\u2019s destruction of 89 medieval churches, 5,480 intricate cross-stones, and 22,700 tombstones,\u201d is the subtitle of an incredible article by Simon Maghakyan and Sarah Pickman, published in the Hyperallergic Newsletter last week. The article is titled: \u201cA Regime Conceals its Erasure of Indigenous Armenian Culture.\u201d<\/div>\n
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In April 2011, when the US Ambassador to Azerbaijan wanted to visit Nakhichevan, an Armenian territory classified by the Soviets as an \u201cautonomous republic\u201d 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.<\/div>\n
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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.<\/div>\n
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\u201cIn December 2005, an Iranian border patrol alerted the Prelate of Northern Iran\u2019s 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\u2019s remaining 2,000 khachkars; over 1,000 had already been purged in 1998 and 2002,\u201d reported Maghakyan and Pickman.<\/div>\n
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The flattened land, where the khachkars stood for centuries, is now a military rifle range. The \u201cdemolition was the \u2018grand finale\u2019 of Azerbaijan\u2019s eradication of Nakhichevan\u2019s Armenian past,\u201d wrote the two authors.<\/div>\n
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Maghakyan and Pickman reported that \u201cthe 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 \u2018satellite evidence is consistent with reports by observers on the ground who have reported the destruction of Armenian artifacts in the Djulfa cemetery.\u2019\u201d<\/div>\n
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\u201cAbsolutely false and slanderous information \u2026 [fabricated by] the Armenian lobby,\u201d proclaimed Azerbaijan\u2019s President Ilham Aliyev, who makes frequent threats against Armenia and distorts its history.<\/div>\n
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The authors also quote from public decree No.5-03\/S on December 6, 2005, by Nakhichevan\u2019s \u201clocal autocrat\u201d Vasif Talibov, a relative of Pres. Aliyev, \u201cordering a detailed inventory of Nakhichevan\u2019s monuments. Three years later, the investigation was summed up in the bilingual English and Azerbaijani \u2018Encyclopedia of Nakhchivan Monuments,\u2019 co-edited by Talibov himself. Missing from the 522-page \u2018Encyclopedia\u2019 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\u2019s foreword explicitly reveals \u2018Armenians\u2019 as the reason for No. 5-03\/S: \u2018Thereafter the decision issued on 6 December 2005 \u2026 a passport was issued for each monument \u2026 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]\u2026.\u2019\u201d<\/div>\n
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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, \u201cStone Dreams,\u201d the protagonist, an intellectual from Agulis, refers to memories of the town\u2019s eight of the 12 medieval churches that had survived until the 1990\u2019s, and protects a victim of anti-Armenian pogroms in Azerbaijan\u2019s capital Baku. Pres. Aliyev revoked Aylisli\u2019s pension and title of \u201cPeople\u2019s Writer.\u201d 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\u2019s Parliament. He fearlessly sent a telegram to Pres. Heydar Aliyev in 1997, calling the destruction of the Armenian churches in Aylis an \u201cact of vandalism being perpetrated through the involvement of armed forces and employment of anti-tank mines.\u201d<\/div>\n
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The two authors spoke with Russian journalist Shura Burtin who after interviewing Aylisli in 2013 traveled to Nakhichevan and reported that he didn\u2019t see \u201ca trace of the area\u2019s glorious past.\u201d Burtin concluded: \u201cNot even ISIS could commit such an epic crime against humanity.\u201d<\/div>\n
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The authors reported that Aylisli\u2019s 2018 non-fiction essay in Farewell, claimed \u201cthat a mosque built five years ago on the site of one of the destroyed churches has been boycotted by locals because \u2018everyone in Aylis knows that prayers offered in a mosque built in the place of a church don\u2019t reach the ears of Allah.\u2019\u201d<\/div>\n
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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\u2019s silence: \u201cOil-rich Azerbaijan\u2019s annihilation of Nakhichevan\u2019s Armenian past make it worse than ISIS, yet UNESCO and most Westerners have looked away.\u201d ISIS-demolished sites like Palmyra can be renovated, Ayvazyan argued, but \u201call that remain of Nakhichevan\u2019s Armenian churches and cross-stones that survived earthquakes, caliphs, Tamerlane, and Stalin are my photographs.\u201d<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
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\u201cA groundbreaking forensic report tracks Azerbaijan\u2019s destruction of 89 medieval churches, 5,480 intricate cross-stones, and 22,700 tombstones,\u201d is the subtitle of an incredible article by Simon Maghakyan and Sarah Pickman, published in the Hyperallergic Newsletter last week. The article is titled: \u201cA Regime Conceals its Erasure of Indigenous Armenian Culture.\u201d In April 2011, when the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4101,"featured_media":774085,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[41,3488],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-663442","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-azerbaijan","category-harut-sassounian"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/663442","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4101"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=663442"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/663442\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/774085"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=663442"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=663442"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=663442"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}