Azerbaijan, UN sign Peace4Culture action plan

PanARMENIAN.Net - Minister of Culture of Azerbaijan Anar Kerimov and the United Nations High Representative for the Alliance of Civilizations have signed an action plan ironically named Peace4Culture.

Kerimov said in February that he had set up a working group tasked with removing “false” Armenian traces from Nagorno-Karabakh churches that came under Baku's control during the war in fall 2020.

According to information published by the UN, the “Peace4Culture Global Call” Action Plan underpins the "interdependence of peaceful relations and the safeguarding of cultural and religious heritage".

Over the past year and a half, however, Azerbaijani authorities have been systematically desecrating or destroying Armenian monuments in Karabakh. At least two churches have been torn down since a Russian-brokered ceasefire stopped the war, and entire villages have been razed to the ground.

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.