Azerbaijanis destroy Armenian Genocide memorial in Karabakh

PanARMENIAN.Net - New images have surfaced on social media showing that a memorial dedicated to the victims of the Armenian Genocide, the Patriotic War and the first Nagorno-Karabakh war in Shushi has been razed to the ground by Azerbaijani forces.

The city fell under Azerbaijan's control during Baku's six-week aggression against Karabakh in fall 2020. Since then, Kanach Zham (Green Chapel) Church has been at least partially destroyed, a handful of monuments have been ruined and desecrated in Shushi alone.

Now, aerial pictures posted on Telegram channels show an empty spot where the monument used to be.

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. Another Armenian church in the town of Mekhakavan (Jebrayil) has been razed down, as evidenced in a BBC report. 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.