Save Armenia CEO: Azerbaijan has no right to claim that Armenian history never existed

ArmInfo. Azerbaijan has every right to tell its own national history, but it has no right to claim that Armenian history never existed. This was stated by Dr. Paul Murray, CEO of the human rights initiative Save Armenia and a Christian leader working on global religious freedom, as reported by the online newspaper The Christian Post.

He recalled that today Azerbaijan controls Artsakh, and more than 120,000 Armenians were forcibly expelled from their historical homeland after months of blockade, brutal deprivation, and the Azerbaijani military offensive in September 2023. "Such control carries a moral responsibility." "It does not give Azerbaijan the right to rewrite the identity of the people it expelled or to change the meaning of the sacred sites they left behind," Murray stated.

Meanwhile, as the director general of the human rights initiative noted, this month the Azerbaijani government organized an official tour of Artsakh for approximately 150 representatives from 58 countries and nine international organizations. Specifically, he described how Hikmet Hajiyev, foreign policy adviser to President Ilham Aliyev, presented the medieval monasteries of Gandzasar and Dadivank as evidence of ancient Caucasian Albanian Christianity.

"Azerbaijani officials accused the Armenians of altering the appearance of the structures and violating their original character. Caucasian Albania did indeed exist. "The attempt to use the very fact of its existence to erase the medieval Armenian identity of monuments whose walls themselves bear witness to that history is a fabrication," Murray stated.

In this regard, he noted that Gandzasar contains numerous Armenian inscriptions documenting its construction, those who commissioned it, and its religious affiliation, while Dadivank, in addition to inscriptions, also contains khachkars—stone crosses with carved images characteristic of Armenian Christianity.

"There is nothing funny about trying to erase the history of an entire people—especially after that people were expelled from the land on which that history was written. Azerbaijan has every right to tell its own national history. But it has no right to claim that Armenian history never existed. The Armenian inscription carved on the walls of a church seven centuries ago poses no threat to Azerbaijan's sovereignty." "It only testifies to the undeniable truth: Armenian Christians were here," the Save Armenia CEO emphasized.

Considering the above, he noted that the international community should demand that Azerbaijan grant UNESCO and independent cultural heritage specialists permanent and full access to Artsakh. "A comprehensive inventory of Armenian churches, monasteries, inscriptions, manuscripts, khachkars, and cemeteries must be conducted. Their Armenian identity must be documented and preserved. Forcibly displaced Armenians must also be provided with meaningful access to their holy sites and family graves," Murray concluded.

As a reminder, on September 19, 2023, Azerbaijan, under the pretext of an "anti-terrorist operation," initiated a large-scale aggression against Artsakh, which led to the complete de-Armenization of the NKR. This was preceded by a nearly 10-month blockade of the republic. Since the enemy aggression that began in the fall of 2020, which culminated in the complete ethnic cleansing of Artsakh in September 2023, over 150,000 Artsakh residents have lost their homeland and become refugees.