The Sunday Times, UK
Nov 22 2021
A Russian-brokered ceasefire in the bitter conflict with Azerbaijan leaves hundreds of historic Christian monuments under its Muslim enemy’s control
Marc Bennetts, Moscow
Sunday November 22 2020, 12.01am GMT, The Sunday Times
The fierce fighting between Armenia and Azerbaijan has claimed many lives
ALEXANDER RYUMIN
Battle-hardened Armenian soldiers crossed themselves and gazed one last time at the medieval inscriptions on the walls of the ancient Dadivank monastery in Nagorno-Karabakh. In defeat, they fear that the monuments of their Christian heritage are doomed.
On Wednesday, conquerors will move into this mountainous redoubt in the south Caucasus when it changes hands yet again in a conflict that has been fought intermittently for a century.
After six weeks of fierce fighting between Armenia and Azerbaijan that has cost many lives, a Russian-brokered ceasefire is in force.
As mainly Muslim Azerbaijan, backed by its ally Turkey, reasserts itself in the region, there are mounting fears over the fate of thousands of Armenian Christian monuments and cultural heritage sites, some of which are more than 1,500 years old.
Azerbaijan has given assurances that they will be protected, but critics have accused it of attempting to erase any traces of an Armenian presence in territories already under its control.
“We’re talking medieval churches, monasteries, cemeteries, all the things that comprise a people’s culture,” said Professor Igor Dorfmann-Lazarev, an expert on Armenian history and culture at the School of Oriental and African Studies in London. “They have ripped out [the Armenians’] identity.”
To much of the world, the Nagorno-Karabakh war is an obscure and meaningless struggle in the middle of nowhere. To those involved, however, the dispute matters so much that thousands of young men have gone to their deaths once more on battlefields that have been fought over for millennia.
Local Armenians in Nagorno-Karabakh still call it Artsakh, which was a province in the kingdom of Armenia between the Black Sea and the Caspian on the eastern fringes of the Roman empire. Armenia became Christian in 301 AD and survived in various forms and under warring regional empires until, as part of Russia, it declared itself independent in 1918 in the wake of the Bolshevik revolution.
After wars with neighbouring Georgia, Turkey and Azerbaijan, however, Armenia ended up in the new Soviet Union and remained so until the communist empire’s collapse in 1991 — when armed hostilities with Azerbaijan, which had also spent the past seven decades in the USSR, swiftly resumed.
These centred on the mountains of Nagorno-Karabakh, an area of Azerbaijan that had long ago been Armenian territory and had a majority population of ethnic Armenians alongside a minority of Azeris.
In Azerbaijan, the invasion and recapture this month of large swathes of Nagorno-Karabakh has sparked joy: hundreds of thousands of Azeris who were driven from the area during a war with Armenia in the early 1990s now hope they will be able to return to their homes.
In fearing for their cultural patrimony under Azeri reoccupation, Armenians cite evidence elsewhere in the ethnic patchwork of the southern Caucasus.
A report last year backed up by satellite imagery and documentary evidence detailed what its authors called the systematic destruction of Armenian monuments in Nakhchivan, an Azerbaijani enclave that borders Iran. It listed 89 centuries-old churches, 22,000 tombstones and 5,840 khachkars — intricate Armenian memorials that are usually described in English as cross-stones.
Simon Maghakyan, an Armenian scholar who co-wrote the report, called the Azerbaijani campaign “the greatest cultural genocide of the 21st century”.
The most high-profile casualty of the campaign was an Armenian medieval graveyard that was razed by Azerbaijan soldiers armed with sledgehammers in 2005-06. Over 2,000 cross-stones were dumped into the Araxes river, a process that was filmed by an Armenian priest from across the border in Iran.
Azerbaijan insists, however, that the churches and cemeteries never existed and says the demolition of the Djulfa cemetery was “a figment of Armenia’s imagination”.
The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, which hosted an exhibition of Armenian culture in 2018, is among the organisations to have appealed for the protection of monuments and churches in Nagorno-Karabakh. Among the areas to be handed over to Azerbaijan is Tigranakert, a major Hellenistic and Armenian archaeological site whose foundations date back 2,000 years.
Ilham Aliyev, the Azerbaijani president, has sought to assuage concerns, pledging during talks with Vladimir Putin, the Russian leader, that Christian churches will be protected and kept open.
Moscow is sending 2,000 troops to Nagorno-Karabakh to enforce the ceasefire and Russian soldiers are currently guarding the Dadivank monastery, a landmark site dating from the 12th century.
Azerbaijan has its own grievances. It has accused the Armenians of vandalising graveyards, defiling a mosque by turning it into a cowshed and destroying historical and cultural monuments while they controlled Nagorno-Karabakh.
As they await the arrival of Azerbaijani troops, Armenians are sceptical about Aliyev’s promises.
“The most tangible evidence Armenians have for their continuous existence in Nagorno-Karabakh are the indigenous monuments built over the past 2,000 years,” Maghakyan said.
“Destruction is inevitable. There is no hope for the cross-stones, because they are much easier to destroy.”
Armenian churches and monuments have reportedly been damaged in Shusha, the region’s second city, since it was captured by the Azerbaijani army this month. It’s inaccurate, though, Maghakyan says, to portray the dispute as a clash between Christians and Muslims.
“Azerbaijan may be telling its soldiers that ‘infidel monuments’ should not exist, but the elites who are organising the destruction are not doing this for religious reasons,” he said.
“Religion is a default feature, not a motivation, of Azerbaijan’s destruction of Armenian cultural monuments.”
Around 2,000 Armenian cultural monuments will now come under Azerbaijani control, said Hamlet Petrosyan, an archaeologist at Armenia’s National Academy of Sciences. “The world community only knows about the symbolic, landmark monuments like Dadivank,” he said.
Petrosyan said it was likely that Azerbaijan would leave more high-profile sites untouched, at least for now. “No one is likely to dare to do anything to Dadivank monastery while Russian troops are there. But what will happen as time passes?”
On Friday, Azerbaijani forces entered the city of Aghdam, one of several territories that it surrendered to Armenia in the 1990s war.
The city was once home to 50,000 people, but it was so devastated by Armenian pillagers that it’s sometimes called the “Hiroshima of the Caucasus”.
A local mosque organised the first prayer service in the city for 27 years amid scenes of jubilation in Baku, the capital of Azerbaijan.
https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/armenians-fear-a-sacking-of-the-monasteries-with-nagorno-karabakh-retreat-3b8zhwdpt?fbclid=IwAR3fI51BPBjlUlPr5WPZ-pWx4hToFS42t9e0DOyEQpsfwHWylaRksUb3fco