Unlike Armenian scholars, Azerbaijani dissidents often see the destruction of Nakhichevan’s Armenian heritage as part of a domestic crackdown on all forms of opposition to Azerbaijan’s ruling elite. This was despite the Muslim country’s outright denial that the cemetery has been destroyed-and despite the fact that Azerbaijan is a member of the Council of Europe and thus committed to respecting cultural heritage. The court records indicate that Büyükfırat transferred some 2 million Turkish lira for Tahşiyeciler operations. According to a review of court documents, Hüseyin Büyükfırat, former IHH representative for the Caucasus, had run the operations of the IHH under the pretense of charitable work while keeping in contact with a Turkish al-Qaeda group called Tahşiyeciler. The veteran police chiefs who had investigated Tahşiyeciler were dismissed and later jailed on fabricated charges of defaming the al-Qaeda group and its leader. A Turkish prosecutor who had investigated Mullah Muhammed, a radical preacher who openly called for armed jihad, declared his support for Osama bin Laden and urged the beheading of Americans, listed the Baku-based Büyükfırat as a suspect in his investigation. If you have any type of questions concerning where and how you can make use of escort Diyarbakır, you can call us at our own internet site. When the police rounded up Mullah Muhammed and his associates in February 2009, Büyükfırat was in Azerbaijan and remained at large for eight months. History repeated itself four years later when Azerbaijan launched yet another aggressive war against Artsakh. Aylisli, who has been under de facto house arrest since Stone Dreams’s release, protested Azerbaijan’s destruction of Nakhichevan’s Armenian past for many years. It caused tens of thousands of deaths on both sides and many more displaced refugees, the majority of whom were Azerbaijanis from surrounding territories that the otherwise island-shaped Nagorno-Karabakh considers its existential guarantee

Yet a tourist in Nakhichevan, which was not a war zone, would encounter neither Armenian heritage sites nor public acknowledgment of the region’s far-reaching Armenian roots, including the medieval global trade networks launched by Djulfa’s innovative merchants. Such a shift likely occurred in response to the rebellious cultural awakening in Armenia, which, as Armenian-American scholar Pietro Shakarian argues, was among the first Soviet republics to experience the "Thaw" and de-Stalinization. By the late 1980s when the Soviet Union crumbled, less than 4,000 Armenians remained in Nakhichevan-so few that the exclave avoided the ethnic warfare that exploded in Karabakh where a larger Armenian population remained under the administration of Muslim Azerbaijan. Baroness Cox, a long-standing campaigner for the protection of Armenian heritage in Azerbaijan who has urged the British government to take action, told The Art Newspaper that, despite the influential Armenian Diaspora, both the US and UK administrations are more concerned with cultivating close relations with oil-rich Azerbaijan and its ally Turkey, than with Armenia. Unable to hold Azerbaijan accountable for the purge of Nakhichevan’s Armenian cultural heritage, Armenians and their allies have rethought what forms justice might take. "I’m telling you to take up your guns and kill them," he said in recorded sermons, adding, "If the sword is not used, then this is not Islam." According to Mullah Muhammed, all Muslims were obligated to respond to then-al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden’s armed fight

Since Azerbaijan banned international fact-finders from visiting Nakhichevan, the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) employed remote sensing technologies in its pioneer investigation into cultural destruction. Yet remote restoration of Nakhichevan’s lost Armenian monuments or alternative measures of accountability fall short of unanimous approval. Armenian researcher Samvel Karapetyan, whose diligent documentation of remote medieval Armenian monuments in Nagorno-Karabakh has been dubbed "constructive ultra-nationalism," sees Azerbaijan’s destruction of Armenian monuments as an effort to neutralize Armenian "historical rights" or antiquity-derived political legitimacy in the region. A groundbreaking forensic report tracks Azerbaijan’s recent destruction of 89 medieval churches, 5,840 intricate cross-stones, and 22,000 tombstones. Missing from the 522-page "Encyclopedia" are the 89 medieval churches, 5,840 intricate khachkars, and 22,000 tombstones that Ayvazyan had meticulously documented. Scottish researcher Steven Sim had traveled to post-Soviet Nakhichevan to assess the condition of the Armenian churches photographed earlier by Ayvazyan. Today, the scholar Argam Ayvazyan - like all those of Armenian ethnicity and background - is banned by Azerbaijan’s government from visiting his native Nakhichevan. It is not just Armenians who have been affected by Azerbaijan’s government-sanctioned destruction in Nakhichevan. Armenian lobby." These were the words used by Azerbaijan’s president Ilham Aliyev - successor to and son of KGB-leader-turned-President Heydar Aliyev - to describe reports of Djulfa’s destruction in an April 2006 speech. In fact, the Aliyev regime’s controversy-riddled diplomacy promotes Azerbaijan as a "land of tolerance." In 2012, the European Stability Initiative described Azerbaijan’s generous spending on lobbying and attempts to woo foreign allies as "caviar diplomacy." This petrodollar-funded campaign has entailed various donations, including cultural preservation grants of undisclosed sums to the Vatican