Some Azerbaijani Tall Tales

Vartan Matiossian

I recently came across an asinine piece crafted by some Azerbaijani "historian" and lodged at their "Presidential Library" meant to show the huge antiquity of Baku (1), which was an obscure Russian outpost in the nineteenth century until oil extraction started and Armenians, who were among the pioneering oilmen, became one of the main driving forces behind the building and embellishment the city in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. However, this is something those "historians" always fail to remember.

Azerbaijan’s Destruction of Armenian Heritage in Artsakh Continues Unabated

  Rhea Nayyar

Experts’ fears regarding Azerbaijan’s accelerated destruction of Armenian cultural heritage sites across Artsakh (also known by the Russian name Nagorno-Karabakh) have been realized in the last seven months since the autocratic regime forced more than 100,000 ethnic Armenians from their homeland. As Azerbaijani law prevents free and independent press access to the region, archaeologists and anthropologists are relying on satellite imagery to monitor attacks on hundreds of important sites pertaining to Armenian culture and spirituality.

Why No One Should Believe Reports of Armenians' 'Voluntary' Exodus from Artsakh

Mashinka Firunts Hakopian
Shushan Karapetian

Over the last two weeks, thousands of vehicles have lined a serpentine road stretching for three miles in the South Caucasus Mountains near the border of Armenia and Azerbaijan. At times, the multitude of cars was so dense that it could be seen from space. The travelers — refugees — survived extreme deprivation for nine months and a harrowing military assault against their homeland.

The road, known as the Lachin Corridor, is the sole escape route out of the Armenian Republic of Artsakh, also called Nagorno-Karabakh, situated on territory Azerbaijan claims is its own. As of Monday, more than 100,000 Artsakh Armenians, the Indigenous people of the region, had fled from the land their ancestors lived on for millennia. They face an uncertain future.

Bad Neighbor

 Milena Baghdasaryan

To best understand the obstacles to peace in Artsakh, one just needs to look at the contents found in the Azerbaijani education system, which not only reflect the Azerbaijani government’s general attitude toward the Armenian nation but also serve as a powerful force perpetuating the vicious cycle of Armenophobia among Azerbaijani youth. The falsification of history and the aggression toward Armenians are vividly pronounced not only in the history textbooks of Azerbaijan but across a wide spectrum of subjects and disciplines, among which literature is a very powerful one. 

Amid International Backlash to Invasion of Ukraine, I Wonder: What About the Armenians?

 Ani Arzoumanian

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is a horrifying attack on human rights and on a nation’s entitlement to self-determination. My heart goes out to all Ukrainians across the world, especially to those forced to flee from their homes and to those determined to stand their ground and fight in Kyiv.

In response to this attack, the U.S. and other major powers have imposed significant sanctions on Russia, according to The New York Times, and international media outlets continue to cover the progress of events day and night. People around the world are outraged, many taking to the streets in protest or using social media as a platform for activism, according to The New York Times. Even The Maroon-News has been flooded with submissions from student writers eager to cover the events in Ukraine, many of which were published in the first March 2022 issue.

I am not dismayed by the attention that Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is getting in the media. I am envious. 

Emboldened by Ukraine Crisis, Azerbaijan Escalates its War on Armenian Heritage Sites

Simon Maghakyan

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.

“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.

Azerbaijani Propaganda and Falsifications of Alexander Tamanyan’s ‘Russian Period’ Heritage

 Valeria Olyunina

Today we once again raise the issue of the destruction of Christian monuments in Nagorno-Karabakh, set before the international community by the new barbarians, who came to us from yesterday’s Soviet Republic, destroying not only the heritage of Armenians, but also that of the other ethnic groups of the Caucasus: Lezgins, Talyshes, Udins, and more. Azerbaijan’s President Ilham Aliyev and his authoritarian regime is equally biased toward destroying both Christian Armenian churches, as well as monuments to the heroes of the Great Patriotic War (1941–1945) and heroes of socialist labour of Armenian origin. 

Do Armenians Have Any Friends in Turkish Civil Society?

 Harout Ekmanian

It is human nature, that one turns to friends and dear ones in difficult times. For Armenians who built friendships with Turkish colleagues in civil society, art, journalism, academia and other related fields, these friends were out of sight for the 44-day long aggression and ethnic cleansing against their kin in Artsakh. They were nowhere to be found to counter the State mandated hate propaganda against Armenians. They weren’t even able to send a couple of comforting words let alone any public action. 

Preserve Artsakh: An Open Letter to the World Community

The end to active combat in the 2020 Nagorno Karabakh war is far from the end of the war on a key victim: the rich and irreplaceable cultural heritage of Artsakh, as the republic is known to Armenians.

Only two years ago, Armenian art, history, and culture were celebrated by some of the world’s most acclaimed cultural institutions. Armenia! at the Metropolitan Museum of Art was a major international exhibition of Armenian medieval art. The wonders on display broke attendance records, earned critical praise, and demonstrated the major contributions of Armenians to world civilization. The Smithsonian Folklife Festival celebrated Armenian artistic and cultural traditions during its annual interactive exposition on the National Mall in Washington DC, drawing record numbers. That same year, the global consortium of French-speaking nations gathered in Armenia’s capital of Yerevan for the Summit of the Francophonie, hosting hundreds of world leaders, visitors and the international media. 

Now, just two short years later, the world looks away as Armenian art, architecture, and history are being destroyed. On September 27, 2020, Azerbaijan launched a large-scale military attack on the Republic of Artsakh. Turkey, which continues to deny its genocidal project of the annihilation of the Armenian people perpetrated in 1915-1922 in their historical homeland, has lent its full political and military support to Azerbaijan in this latest act of aggression.

An Open Letter to Members of the International Association of Genocide Scholars

Regarding Recent "Genocide Watch" Pronouncements on the Situation in and around Nagorno-Karabakh

Henry Theriault

Dear IAGS Members,

I do not write what follows in my capacity as president of International Association of Genocide Scholars (IAGS), but as a member of IAGS and a scholar of genocide, including its denial and the complexities of long-term post-genocide perpetrator-victim asymmetrical domination relations. I am also half Armenian; at the same time, for years I have been clear that any human rights violations by Armenians against Azeris should be investigated and go through an appropriate legal process, with appropriate punishments for all who committed them. I am unaware of any parallel call for Azeri accountability by any scholar (or other person) of Azeri descent, but hope there has been or will be at least one.

A Cocktail of Falsehood and Intellectual Dishonesty

 Vartan Matiossian

The Istanbul bureau chief of The New York Times, Carlotta Gall, appears to have been in her latest destination long enough to learn and internalize some of the crassest tactics of Turkish denialism.

She could not refrain from turning her dispatch from Baku, “Roots of War: When Armenia Talked Tough, Azerbaijan Took Action” (The New York Times, October 27, 2010), into the usual mix of reporting and opinion that characterizes “journalism” these days. One wonders if she used to do the same when reporting from Chechnya and Afghanistan. In any case, this article will hardly earn her a prize for journalistic fairness. She omitted the point already raised by Turkish presidential spokesman Ibrahim Kalın in last May, who extended greetings to Azerbaijan on its Republic Day, wishing “more beautiful, brighter and stronger days” in the future as “one nation, two states,” to hammer on its Armenian equivalent “Artsakh is Armenia” (mentioned by Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan in August) as unofficial spokesperson to Azerbaijan president’s foreign policy adviser Hikmet Hajiyev’s lame justification for Azerbaijan’s aggression: “The final nail in the coffin of the negotiation process was when he said that Nagorno-Karabakh was Armenian.”

What’s Behind All the Pro-Azerbaijan Articles?

 Nanore Barsoumian

Azerbaijan’s President Ilham Aliyev has opened another battlefront thousands of miles away from Baku, in the pages of local and national newspapers and news sites in the US. Much like the Syrian mercenaries Baku recruited and deployed with the help of Turkish defense contractors to target Armenians, Azerbaijan’s US-based lobbyists are at the forefront of an “information warfare” that costs millions of dollars annually. 

One important aspect of the work of these lobbyists is to place, disseminate and promote anti-Armenian narratives. Their tactics have evolved into a relentless smear campaign through US media outlets, painting Armenia as a close ally of Iran that undermines Western policies and Armenians as intolerant and anti-Semitic. At the same time, Azerbaijan is depicted as a beacon of tolerance, an ally of Israel and a champion of religious rights.

Nagorno-Karabakh conflict: its meaning to Armenians

Avedis Hadjian

With hundreds dead on both sides, the war between Armenian and Azeri forces in Karabakh — in Armenian, Artsakh — a mountainous enclave in the Southern Caucasus, is now anything but ‘frozen’, as it has long been described. A tenuous ceasefire had held since 1994, when the population of this historically Armenian region secured its de facto independence, in close cooperation with the Republic of Armenia. Peace has mostly prevailed since then, except for a four-day war in 2016 and a major flare-up last July.

The immediate cause of the fighting that broke out on 27 September is Azerbaijan’s attempt to reclaim territory that was within its borders during the Soviet period. After the Caucasian Bureau of the Bolshevik Party initially recognised Karabakh’s right to autonomy and promising it to Armenia following the republic’s sovietisation in 1920, Joseph Stalin, then commissar of nationalities of the Soviet Union, intervened, and the Soviets gave Karabakh to Azerbaijan in 1921. Armenians argue that this decision flies in the face of its history of continuous autonomy under Armenian princes since at least the eighth century and, more importantly, its population being more than 90% Armenian. In 1923, the Soviet government proclaimed the enclave an autonomous region within the Socialist Soviet Republic of Azerbaijan.

Israeli academics ask Israel: Stop arms sales to Azerbaijan

 Uzay Bulut

Since September 27, Azerbaijan has launched a major offensive against the Armenian Republic of Artsakh, also known as Nagorno-Karabakh, located in the South Caucasus. Azerbaijan has since indiscriminately bombed civilians, with the direct support it receives from Turkey, who recruited jihadists from Syria and elsewhere.

The Israeli government, it seems, continues to sell weapons to Azerbaijan during the height of this war. In an open letter on October 5, a group of academics from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem called upon the Israeli government to immediately cease these arms sales. The letter reads, in part:

“From a reading of independent accounts and analysis we have concluded that this outbreak of violence in the last few days is due solely to aggression of the Republic of Azerbaijan, supported by Turkey and backed up by fighters from elsewhere in the region.”

Armenian Gandzak: Historical Background

Henrik Bakhchinyan
Translated by Artsvi Bakhchinyan

Gandzak (from the Armenian word gandz – treasure; Persian-Turkish pronunciation is Ganja) is located in the Utik province of Greater Armenia. It is both historically and geographically part of the eastern region of Armenia, in particular, the historical Gardmank and Northern or Plains Artsakh provinces. 

Naturally, the main information about Gandzak is provided by Armenian sources. According to them, the city was founded in 846 and was surrounded by many Armenian villages and monasteries. The Dasno monastery, built earlier (in 751), where the great scholar, writer, Mkhitar Gosh (1130–1213) wrote his “Code Book,” was especially famous. 

This Year’s UNESCO Session Was an Insult to World Heritage

Simon Maghakyan

Moments ago, the global organization for cultural preservation — UNESCO — announced the final list of 29 historical and natural wonders that have now officially joined the ranks of the Pyramids and Grand Canyon as World Heritage Sites. But the celebrated site of Djulfa, which boasted the world’s largest collection of exquisitely-carved medieval cross-stones as remnants of the area’s once-thriving community of Armenian Christians, was not among the 35 candidates vying for World Heritage Site designation. The legendary historical site is disqualified from such an honor, because the host of this year’s UNESCO World Heritage Committee session, the government of Azerbaijan, has erased its existence.

About the ‘Armenia!’ exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of New York

 Claude Mutafian

A distinguished art historian and well-known specialist of Byzantium, Mrs. Helen Evans has been working at the Metropolitan Museum of Art for many years. Among the exhibitions she has organized, let us mention ‘The Glory of Byzantium (843-1261)’ in 1997 and ‘Byzantium: Faith and Power (1261-1557)’ in 2004. Such topics involved necessarily neighboring Armenia, and Mrs. Evans’ growing interest for Armenian art was finally materialized by the present widely publicized exhibition called ‘Armenia!’, where the curious exclamation mark may reflect some kind of admiration. More important is the absence of any mention of period in the title, contrary to the two abovementioned Byzantine exhibitions. At first glance, it suggests that the exhibition should cover the three millennia of Armenian history, or at least, if one decides to exclude Urartu, the period from 500 B.C. to our days. This is not the case: it begins at the dawn of the 4th century, with the Christianization of Armenia, and ignores totally one millennium of pagan Armenia. As an example, the absence of the name of the most famous of all Armenian kings, Tigranes the Great (1st century B.C.), in an exhibition called ‘Armenia!’ looks strange, if not unacceptable. It would have been fair to call the exhibition ‘Christian Armenia!’, and briefly explain on an introductory panel that Armenia did exist long before, and that Christianization opened a new artistic era. Such was the case of the exhibition properly called ‘Armenia Sacra’ in Paris (musée du Louvre, 2007).

Kemal Oksuz’s Controversial Past Raises Eyebrows

Kevin (Kemal) Oksuz, the Turkish-born American citizen wanted by the United States who was arrested in Armenia by Yerevan police, was engaged in anti-Armenian lobbying in the US before coming to Armenia. Moreover, Oksuz’s lobbying was sponsored by Azerbaijani oil dollars.

Armenpress looked into Oksuz’s past, and the story began to appear more intriguing, to say the least.

According to a document of the state registry of Armenia, Oksuz founded The Sena Group, a destination and event management company, in 2017 in Armenia.  The address of the company is listed as 12 A Vagharshyan St, Arabkir district, Yerevan.

Armenia and Israel: The road to better relations

James Hasso

 

The Eastern Mediterranean region is not known for having the easiest of political situations. Two nations not typically focused on in tandem, but share similar struggles are the states of Armenia and Israel.

From both experiencing genocides, to being minorities surrounded by what can be considered hostile neighbors, Armenia and Israel have similar backgrounds. Despite that, due to geopolitics, including Israel’s relationships with Azerbaijan and Turkey, relations between the two nations are not where they would be expected to be.

Israel’s recent motion to recognize the Armenian Genocide (and the concurrent Assyrian and Greek Genocides) committed by Ottoman Turks and Kurds is commendable and certainly a great step in the right direction.

Baku's Man in America

Jonny Wrate

 

The Azerbaijani Laundromat — a set of intertwined bank accounts used as a slush fund by the country’s elite to buy luxury goods, pay off European politicians, and launder money — also included payments to an individual working to influence American policy in the interest of Azerbaijan, an analysis of the data shows.

Overall, some €2.5 billion (US$ 2.9 billion) flowed through the Laundromat between 2012 and 2014. The Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project (OCCRP) and partners first revealed the scheme last September. A portion of the money was used to advance the Azerbaijani government’s political agenda, with some ending up in bank accounts belonging to European politicians who spoke highly of President Ilham Aliyev’s authoritarian regime even as it arrested journalists and opposition activists.

As it turns out, another recipient of Laundromat money — to the tune of a quarter million dollars — was an influential American oil and gas consultant of Azerbaijani origin who worked to influence US policy in his native country’s favor.