Morning Star: Azeri president vows erase Armenian traces in occupied areas

PanARMENIAN.Net - Azerbaijan's President Ilham Aliyev has vowed to wipe out all Armenian traces from territories that have come under Azeri occupation following the end of the recent conflict over the disputed territory of Nagorno-Karabakh, British daily newspaper Morning Star says.

Aliyev was pictured in the occupied Hadrut region, where he threatened to erase the Armenian inscriptions from a 12th-century church, branding them “fake.”

Aliyev, who has a PhD in history, claimed that “Armenians wanted to Armenianize this church by leaving inscriptions in Armenian” during his visit to the St Astvatsatsin Church in the village of Tsakuri.

He said that the church looked like “a barn and a rubbish dump,” accusing Armenians of desecrating what he claimed was “an Albanian temple,” which he promised to restore.

The authoritarian Azeri ruler’s cultural destruction drew comparisons to the 1915 Armenian genocide in which 1.5 million men, women and children were systematically exterminated by Ottoman troops, the source says.

During the recent military hostilities, Azerbaijani forces launched two targeted attacks on the Holy Savior Ghazanchetsots Cathedral in Shushi. Azerbaijan earlier "restored" a church by replacing its Armenian inscription with glass art.

Concerns about the preservation of cultural sites in Nagorno-Karabakh are made all the more urgent by the Azerbaijani government’s history of systemically destroying indigenous Armenian heritage—acts of both warfare and historical revisionism. The Azerbaijani government has secretly destroyed a striking number of cultural and religious artifacts in the late 20th century. Within Nakhichevan alone, a historically Armenian enclave in Azerbaijan, Azerbaijani forces destroyed at least 89 medieval churches, 5,840 khachkars (Armenian cross stones) and 22,000 historical tombstones between 1997 and 2006.