The Los Angeles City Council voted unanimously on Tuesday, May 16, to name a Westside intersection “Republic of Artsakh Square” to raise awareness of a dictatorship that has imposed a blockade on Artsakh, threatening 120,000 people with starvation and preventing medical care, City Council President Paul Krekorian said.
The council voted to approve a motion authored by Krekorian and Councilmember Traci Park, whose district includes the newly designated Artsakh Square, to name the intersection of Wilshire Boulevard and Granville Avenue in honor of the embattled region that has great meaning for L.A.’s Armenian community.
The intersection is also the location of the Los Angeles consulate of Azerbaijan.
“Azerbaijan’s dictator has explicitly threatened genocide and called for the expulsion of all Armenians from territories he claims, once again threatening the annihilation of the Armenian people in their ancient homeland,” Krekorian said in a statement.
“This square will stand as a symbol of Artsakh’s self determination and our unequivocal opposition to the Azerbaijani dictatorship’s unproved aggression to erase Armenian history and culture,” Park said in a statement.
Krekorian accused the regime of Azerbaijan President Illham Aliyev of attempting to erase the history of Armenians in their ancestral homeland for the last 25 years, adding that the campaign has intensified since Aliyev’s occupation of Artsakh’s territory in 2020.
The Republic of Artsakh, formerly known as the Republic of Nagorno-Karabakh, seceded from the Soviet Union and formed a democratic state. It is surrounded by the territory of Azerbaijan and only has access to Armenia and the outside world through the Lachin Corridor, which is now being cut off by the armed forces of Azerbaijan.
Azerbaijan’s Consulate General in Los Angeles has accused Armenia of committing atrocities on its land.
“In the early 1990s, Armenia invaded and ethnically cleansed 20% of Azerbaijan’s sovereign territory with impunity. Over 1 million Azerbaijanis were forcibly displaced from their lands (800,000 from occupied districts of Azerbaijan and 250,000 from Armenia),” Consul General Nasimi Aghayev said last year.
“In 2020, Azerbaijan liberated its territories from Armenia’s illegal and United Nations-condemned occupation. During the war, Armenia bombed our major cities, using even the widely banned cluster munitions (as Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International also confirmed), as a result of which 101 Azerbaijani civilians, including 12 infants and children, were killed, 423 civilians were wounded and 80,000 displaced.”
Krekorian’s motion was seconded by council members Bob Blumenfield, Nithya Raman, Monica Rodriguez, John Lee and Hugo-Soto Martinez.
Under the motion, the City Council directed its Department of Transportation to erect permanent ceremonial signs to identify the intersection of Wilshire Boulevard and Granville as Republic of Artsakh Square.