Yashar Aliyev sends letter to UN Secretary-General on consequences of Armenian occupation

Permanent Representative of the Republic of Azerbaijan to the UN Yashar Aliyev sent a letter to the UN Secretary-General about the consequences of the Armenian aggression against Azerbaijan and the vandalism committed over 30 years against the cultural heritage of Azerbaijan in the Karabakh region of Azerbaijan.

Report informs that the letter comes in response to the Armenian representative's absurd allegations about the so-called "destruction of the Armenian cultural heritage" contained in his letter a few days ago.

Yashar Aliyev's letter reads that in connection with the letter of the permanent representative of Armenia, which contains false statements about the realities in the Karabakh region of Azerbaijan, distortion of the root causes of the war unleashed by Armenia against Azerbaijan, it must be taken into account that by doing so Armenia is trying to avoid responsibility for the atrocious crimes committed by it during the armed conflict, falsify history and lay a foundation for its territorial claims.

The document notes that, while shamelessly exploiting the delicate topic of cultural heritage, Armenia is silent on numerous facts that clearly illustrate its insinuations and the hateful policy that it has been pursuing against Azerbaijan for decades. It is common knowledge that Armenia, unlike Azerbaijan, is a mono-ethnic country and that it achieved ethnic homogeneity due to the expulsion of other peoples, including hundreds of thousands of Azerbaijanis, once the largest national minority in Armenia.

The Azerbaijani cultural heritage was completely destroyed and ruined all across Armenia, and many historical sites were "reconstructed" in such a way as to change their unique characteristics. Armenia pursued the same policy concerning the territories of Azerbaijan that were previously under its occupation. Most of the towns and villages of Azerbaijan destroyed by Armenian troops in the early 1990s were subjected to ethnic cleansing, which affected more than 700,000 Azerbaijani residents, and were subsequently wiped off the Earth. Thousands of cultural sites located there, including mosques, temples, mausoleums, museums, art galleries, archaeological sites, libraries, and theaters, were looted and destroyed. In addition, Yashar Aliyev notes that the authentic architectural features of many cultural and religious sites were deliberately and purposefully changed to negate and distort Azerbaijani history, culture, and ethnic identity.

The head of the Azerbaijani mission to the UN further notes that as a result of the Armenian occupation, Azerbaijani religious sites were also desecrated: their religious symbolism was abused when they were used as stables and cattle pens, which was a powerful symbolic anti-Muslim action conceived to inflict a special insult on the Azerbaijanis. Of the 67 mosques and Islamic religious shrines, 65 were destroyed, and two were seriously damaged. Against this background, Armenia declares that it maintains "friendly relations and constructive cooperation" with most Muslim countries, which is the height of impudence. In addition, 900 cemeteries were vandalized in the previously occupied territories. Azerbaijan also recorded the destruction of millions of books and rare manuscripts, the theft of thousands of historically significant museum exhibits, and valuable artifacts discovered during illegal archaeological excavations in these territories. This is an irreplaceable loss for the cultural heritage of Azerbaijan.

The letter notes that immediately after the end of the war, Azerbaijan made it its top priority to restore and reconstruct the liberated territories, including the restoration of all historical and cultural sites without exception. At the invitation of the Azerbaijani government, many international organizations, officials, and independent experts visited these territories to see and document the damage caused during 30 years of occupation and to observe the restoration work being carried out. Loudly declaring now about the "imperativeness" of UNESCO's unimpeded access to the liberated territories of Azerbaijan, Armenia forgets that it consistently denied this organization such access to the same territories when they were under Armenian occupation. Thus, in its report on the implementation in the period from 1995 until 2004 of the Convention for the Protection of Cultural Property in the Event of Armed Conflict and its Protocols of 1954 and 1999, UNESCO stated that it was not in a position to dispatch a mission to check the condition of cultural property in the area since other specialized agencies of the United Nations cannot enter these territories after the Armenian armed forces occupied them.

The Azerbaijani diplomat writes that even now, after the end of the war, Armenia continues to politicize the involvement of humanitarian organizations, and the above letter and the report attached to it are an illustration of attempts to prevent and undermine dialogue and instead promote hostile narratives and disseminate false information. Concerning the ruling on provisional measures handed down by the International Court of Justice on December 7, 2021, Armenia deliberately fails to mention that Azerbaijan also sued Armenia under the provisions of the International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination and that the Court issued two judgments on temporary measures.

In addition, the International Court of Justice rejected most of Armenia's motions for specific measures, including a motion to prevent and prohibit so-called actions to "alter" "heritage sites," which, in essence, was aimed at stopping any kind of restoration work of Azerbaijan in relation to monuments located in the liberated territories.

As for the resolution of the European Parliament adopted in March 2022, and not in 2021, as the permanent representative of Armenia mistakenly claims, even this tendentious text, prepared under the influence of the Armenian diaspora, does not hush up the atrocities committed by the Armenian side against Azerbaijan and its cultural and religious heritage. Thus, this resolution recognizes that the Azerbaijani cities of Aghdam and Fuzuli were almost completely destroyed and looted, and Azerbaijani cultural heritage sites, including cultural and religious sites left by Azerbaijani internally displaced persons in the area, were damaged or destroyed, and emphasizes, in particular, that these sites were either destroyed, partly destroyed, abandoned, desecrated because they were used as cattle pens and altered to remove cultural traces, or dismantled for building materials.

The head of the Azerbaijani mission to the UN notes that instead of trying to distort the facts, mislead the international community, misinterpret international documents and incite enmity and hatred, Armenia should first abandon hostile narratives, stop spreading, promoting, and sponsoring hate propaganda and refrain from such actions, prosecute and punish the perpetrators of war crimes for which it is responsible, commit itself to the normalization of inter-State relations based on international law, fulfill international obligations in good faith and support construction efforts, strengthening and maintaining peace and stability in the region.

Several photographs were also attached to the letter, illustrating the scale and nature of the falsification of history and the destruction of the Azerbaijani cultural heritage during the Armenian occupation of the territories of Azerbaijan.