Blogger News Network
Dec 13 2008
Azerbaijan Demolishes Priceless Medieval Christian Monuments And
Western Nations Yawn
Posted on December 13th, 2008 by The Stiletto in All News, Archeology
& Antiquities News, California News, History News, Michigan News,
Middle Eastern News, New Jersey News, Religious News, Society and
Culture, The United Nations, World Politics
In describing the Taliban’s destruction of the two colossal Buddhas of
Bamiyan in March 2001, The Wall Street Journal noted:
History has accustomed us to the persecutions that intolerance
exercises on those persons whom it intends to subjugate and to the
destructions inflicted on the monuments that represent their beliefs
and convictions. ¦ The case of Afghanistan is unprecedented.
Sadly, such `cultural genocide’ is by no means unprecedented,
according to architecture and design critic Robert Bevan. In his 2006
book, `The Destruction of Memory: Architecture at War’ (Reaktion Books
Ltd.), Bevan makes the case that throughout history, a crime against
humanity has inevitably been followed by the destruction of monuments,
because wiping out all traces that the victims ever existed `is both a
denial of a victor’s deeds and a mark of the incomplete nature of that
victory.’
To cite but one example, Bevan writes that while the Ottoman Turks
destroyed hundreds upon hundreds of churches, monasteries and
monuments during the Armenian Genocide, `Turks have continued to
remove, stone by stone, the evidence of millennia of Armenian
architectural and art history following the mass murder and exile of
the Armenian people.’
In the year before Bevan’s book was published, the medieval Armenian
Christian cemetery of Djulfa (Jugha in Armenian) in the Azerbaijani
exclave of Nakhichevan `vanished.’
For years, Azeris had toppled or vandalized the cemetery’s headstones
in retaliation for the six-year Nagorno-Karabakh War that ended in
1994 with 30,000 people dead, a million others displaced and resulted
in the creation of an independent republic out of a 1,700 square mile
area that Azerbaijan has claimed since the newly-established Soviet
Union redrew the borders between Armenia and Azerbaijan in 1921 and
put the regions of Nakhichevan and Nagorno-Karabakh on the Azeri side.
According to several accounts ` and a real-time videotape by observers
on the other side of the Araks river in Iran – in a final paroxysm of
violence over the course of a week beginning December 10, 2005 some
100 Azerbaijani soldiers smashed thousands of headstones to bits with
sledgehammers, throwing the chunks into the Araks. This documentary
(video link) incorporates footage from the videotape.
But these weren’t just any headstones. Known as khachkars (in Armenian
`khatch’ means cross and `kar’ means stone), they were unique
archeological artifacts ` intricately carved monuments between six and
eight feet high that dated back between the 9th to 16th centuries.
A June 2006 article in Archeology magazine notes that `[n]o formal
archaeological studies were ever carried out at the cemetery ¦ and
its full historical significance will never be known,’ and explains
the destruction of the cemetery as `symbolic violence against the dead
¦ used as an expression of modern enmity.’
Global Response Ranges From Indifferent To Ineffective ¦
In letters to members of Congress and the United Nations Educational,
Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), University of Chicago
anthropologist Adam T. Smith and a group of archaeologists from six
Western nations called the destruction of the cemetery `a violation of
the memories of ancestors and an assault upon the common cultural
heritage of humanity.’ Armenia’s foreign minister at the time Vartan
Oskanian sent his own letter to UNESCO in December 2005 that called
the destruction `tantamount to ethnic cleansing.’
Reps. Joe Knollenberg (R-MI) and Frank Pallone (D-NJ), co-chairs of
the Congressional Caucus on Armenian Issues, condemned the act of
cultural extermination in a letter to the Azerbaijani government,
prompting the Azeri ambassador to the U.S., Hafez Pashayev, to dispute
the videotaped evidence, and asserting that it was impossible to
identify either the cemetery as Armenian or the perpetrators as Azeri
soldiers.
After the Armenian National Committee of America initiated a fax
campaign to U.S. Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice demanding that our
government condemn this act of `cultural cleansing,’ Rep. Grace
Napolitano (D-CA), a member of the House Committee on International
Relations, followed up with an inquiry about the U.S. position on the
matter to Rice. Rice acknowledged that the State Department was aware
of the `allegations of desecration of cultural monuments’ and
indicated that the U.S. `encouraged Armenia and Azerbaijan to work
with UNESCO to investigate the incident.’ In other words, the official
U.S. position was to shrug and look the other way.
The European Parliament issued a resolution condemning the events at
Jugha in February 2006. In the typically namby-pamby multi-cultural EU
MO, the resolution aimed to offend no one. The `objective’ resolution
condemned Armenia and Azerbaijan for mutual crimes against cultural
heritage – though not one case of destruction of Azeri monuments by
Armenians was cited.)
Left unsaid by the resolution: Christian graves were desecrated. For
Armenians it is a particularly cruel blow as the one million genocide
victims who literally dropped dead in their tracks during the forced
march through the Syrian desert never received Christian rites and
proper burials, their bodies left to be fed upon by wild beasts as a
final act of humiliation by Ottoman Turks.
To this day, the European Parliament has yet to inspect the site to
verify the `allegations’ of its destruction, but in April 2006 a
reporter with the nonprofit, London-based Institute for War and Peace
Reporting (IWPR), attempted to ascertain the facts. Escorted by Azeri
security officers, he was kept away from the cemetery itself but was
close enough to see that there were no monuments or headstones left.
Writing about the IWPR’s findings, The Times of London noted that
`Foreign organisations had been unable to visit the cemetery because
it is in Nakhichevan, a tiny enclave of Azerbaijan cut off by Armenia
and Iran and accessible only by air’ and quoted a spokesman for the
Azerbaijani Foreign Ministry asserting that there had never been an
Armenian cemetery or any Armenian cultural relics in the area visited
by the IWPR.
In order to sustain this fiction, Azerbaijan denied access to the
cemetery to 10 EU Members of Parliament who had traveled to
Nakhichevan to check out IWPR’s report, according to this article
published in The Independent:
Fears that Azerbaijan has systematically destroyed hundreds of
500-year-old Christian artefacts have exploded into a diplomatic row,
after Euro MPs were barred from inspecting an ancient Armenian burial
site. ¦
The works – some of the most important examples of Armenian heritage –
are said to have been smashed with sledgehammers last December as the
site was concreted over. ¦
The president of Icomos, Michael Petzet, said: `Now that all traces of
this highly important historic site seem to have been extinguished all
we can do is mourn the loss and protest against this totally senseless
destruction.’
¦ And Now, To Ignominious
Adding insult to injury, earlier this month Baku, Azerbaijan hosted a
little-noticed two-day conference of Council of Europe culture
ministers to discuss `Intercultural dialogue as the basis for peace
and sustainable development in Europe and its neighboring regions.’ In
his opening remarks to the attendees Azeri president Ilham Aliyev,
astonishingly claimed:
`Azerbaijan has rich history and the cultural monuments here are duly
preserved, and a lot is being done in this direction. The country
pursues independent policy. There is no serious discord in society and
the peoples unite around the idea of modernism and Azerbaijanism.’
The high point of the conference was the signing of the `Baku
Declaration for the Promotion of Intercultural Dialogue’ which is
`firmly based’ on the European Convention on Human Rights ¦ as well
as the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the Vienna
Declaration and Plan (Programme) of Action, which bound the
participants to:
affirm cultural diversity between and within countries as a
common heritage of humankind;
agree to contribute to sustainable economic, social and personal
development, favourable to cultural creativity;
promote a sustained process of intercultural dialogue, which is
essential for international co`operation, with a view to promoting
Human Rights, Democracy and the Rule of Law;
reaffirm the important role of cultural policies at national,
regional and local level and their contribution for promoting
intercultural dialogue;
promote intercultural dialogue, including its religious
dimension, as a process that requires a coherent interplay between
different policy sectors and the full participation of the different
stakeholders ` including public authorities, the media and civil
society.
In all the `dialogue’ about `affirming,’ `promoting’ and
`reaffirming,’ it seems the topic of the destruction of the Jugha
cemetery never came up, and none of the attendees made the impolitic
observation that Azerbaijan had either violated the UNESCO World
Heritage Convention if its soldiers had perpetrated the reprehensible
act, or had violated the Valetta Convention by not protecting the
Armenian khachkars from destruction by `the real perpetrators,
whomever they may be.’
Just as the Armenian community in the U.S. is hopeful that an Obama
Administration will champion the Armenian Genocide Resolution, there
is reason to be optimistic that his foreign policy team will also have
a very different response to the ongoing stonewalling by the Azeris
than Rice’s utter disinterest, which is rooted in the Bush
administration’s pro- Azerbaijani, pro-Turkey foreign policy.
In addition to secretary of state nominee Hillary Clinton ` who led
the US delegation to a 1995 UN conference on women’s rights in Beijing
(`If there is one message that echoes forth from this conference, let
it be that human rights are women’s rights and women’s rights are
human rights, once and for all.’) ` prospective U.N. Ambassador Susan
Rice has a particular interest in genocide and is an advocate of
military action to stop mass killings rather than ineffective
`dialogue’ as slaughters continue apace. And Harvard professor
Samantha Power, author of `A Problem from Hell: America and the Age of
Genocide’ (2002), has been quietly advising Obama behind the scenes,
even after falling on her sword during the campaign after making a
comment about Hillary Clinton that caused a ruckus.
Given that past is prologue, with these women’s combined emphasis on
championing human rights and genocide prevention, it will not be easy
for the Obama administration to ignore or overlook the genocide that
preceeded – and encouraged – all others in the 20th and 21st
centuries, or the ongoing `cultural genocides’ in Azerbaijan and
Turkey against the archeological remains of a once-thriving,
centuries-old Armenian population that is no more.
One of The Stiletto’s favorite poems is Percy Bysshe Shelley’s
`Ozymandias’ ` her mother gave it to her to read and ponder in an
attempt to temper her teenage tendency towards hubris. The Stiletto
had always assumed that the ruination of those vast and trunkless legs
of stone and the shattered visage ` as well as the works of which the
ancient king had boasted in his epitaph – had occurred bit by bit from
centuries of erosion by wind-whipped particles of sand until nothing
remained except the boundless and bare desert for as far as the eye
could see. Contemplating Azerbaijan’s destruction of Jugha’s
irreplaceable khachkars, it now occurs to The Stiletto that Ozymandias
and his monuments could also have been consigned to oblivion by the
vengeful hand of man ` such a deliberate and purposeful obliteration,
that he and his people may as well never have existed in the annals of
human history.
BTW: To learn more about the Jugha cemetery and the Armenian cultural
heritage in Nakhichevan, Azerbaijan, check out the Djulfa Virtual
Memorial and Museum.
Photos and more links at