Azerbaijan ready to allow UNESCO mission in Karabakh

PanARMENIAN.Net - Azerbaijan is ready to accept a UNESCO mission in Karabakh and is calling to speed up the process, Foreign Ministry representative Leyla Abdullayeva told reporters on Tuesday, June 22, RIA Novosti reports.

UNESCO has said on several occasions that Azerbaijan is delaying its approval for a mission to Karabakh (Artsakh) to assess damage to cultural and religious sites. Stéphane Dujarric, a spokesperson for the United Nations Secretary-General, has said Azerbaijan is also hindering the organization's humanitarian mission in the region.

Abdullayeva claimed, however, that after a telephone conversation between Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev and UNESCO Director General Audrey Azoulay, the sides have been negotiating the matter in recent months.

"During the last meeting, which took place on June 21, 2021, the Azerbaijani side confirmed its readiness to accept the UNESCO mission and called on the organization to speed up this process," the official representative of the Foreign Ministry said.

In particular, the possible visit of the UNESCO mission to the Nagorno-Karabakh city of Shushi, as well as the Akna (Agdam) and Varanda (Fizuli) regions, which came under the control of the Azerbaijani Armed Forces during the 44-day war in fall 2020, was high on the agenda.

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. Furthermore, Azeri President Ilham Aliyev visited the region of Hadrut in territories occupied by Azerbaijan and declared his intention to "renovate" a 12th century Armenian church, which he claimed to "an Albanian church". Aliyev went so far as to accuse Armenians of leaving "fake inscriptions" in the Armenian language.

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.