A “specialists committee” to purge Armenian history in Nagorno-Karabakh (Artsakh) is the latest in an ongoing campaign to rewrite the history

Yesterday, February 3, the government of Azerbaijan announced the creation of a state organ for purging politically-undesirable monuments in Nagorno-Karabakh (Artsakh in Armenian), the disputed Armenian region that Azerbaijan partially conquered in late 2020.1

  • 1. “A working group of specialists in [Caucasian] Albanian history and architecture has been set up to remove the fictitious traces written by Armenians,” pro-government media quoted Azerbaijan’s minister of culture Anar Karimov referencing a popular state-sponsored conspiracy theory that reimagines indigenous Armenian monuments as appropriated from an extinct civilization.
Azerbaijan’s Vice President Mehriban Aliyeva, who’s also President Ilham Aliyev’s wife, inspects a newly-captured medieval Armenian church in occupied Hadrut in March, 2021
Azerbaijan’s Vice President Mehriban Aliyeva, who’s also President Ilham Aliyev’s wife, inspects a newly-captured medieval Armenian church in occupied Hadrut in March, 2021 © Office of the President of Azerbaijan

Despite Azerbaijan’s extraordinary record of state-sanctioned cultural erasure — from 1997 to 2006, the Aliyev family’s regime (former president Heydar Aliyev and his son, Ilham, the current president) flattened every trace of the vast Armenian heritage of the exclave of Nakhichevan — the announcement that a government body would so brazenly identify epigraphic heritage for elimination still sent shockwaves.

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The new purge organ announced yesterday is particularly startling in light of a precedent-setting decision by the International Court of Justice (ICJ)on December 7, 2021, ordering Azerbaijan to stop destroying Armenian monuments. The ICJ ruled in the Armenia v. Azerbaijan case that the latter must “take all necessary measures to prevent and punish acts of vandalism and desecration.”

The new working group is a brazen defiance of the ICJ’s order. Yet it is consistent with the March 2021 presidential pledge to polish over Nagorno-Karabakh’s numerous Armenian inscriptions, when Aliyev declared at a captured medieval Armenian church that “All these stones are fake. This is Armenian forgery.” There is precedence for such a body: In 2005, during the final phase of the erasure of Nakhichevan’s Armenian past, an 11-member commission was created to “inventorize” the region’s monuments.1

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  • 1. Gabriel Armas-Cardona, a Germany-based international lawyer, told Hyperallergic that Azerbaijan’s intent to violate the ICJ order may have to do with testing limits. “Azerbaijan is probably doing this to see what it can get away with,” he said. “By creating the working group now, Azerbaijan is assessing if steps that lead to a violation but are not themselves a violation are tolerated by the Court.”