10, 2016. Russian intelligence documents even furnished the license plate numbers of trucks dispatched by the IHH loaded with arms and supplies bound for al-Qaeda-affiliated groups including the Nusra Front. Baku’s ability to court friendships has produced many notable results, including a 2015 Time Magazine op-ed describing Azerbaijan as "an oasis of tolerance," commendations of Azerbaijan’s "exemplary interfaith harmony" in several US state legislatures, and medals bestowed upon Azerbaijan’s Vice President - President Aliyev’s wife - by the leaders of France, the Russian Orthodox Church, and even UNESCO, the international organization charged with protecting world heritage. UNESCO’s commendations of Azerbaijan have been particularly puzzling. However, the lack of international condemnation of Azerbaijan’s actions has been a source of frustration to many Armenians. Moreover, following his 2009 retirement, UNESCO director-general Kōichirō Matsuura joined Azerbaijan’s state-managed "Baku International Multiculturalism Centre" as a trustee, while his successor Irina Bokova frequented Baku for President Aliyev’s "World Forum on Intercultural Dialogue." Allegations of foul play lack hard evidence, however, perhaps except for The Guardian’s September 4, 2017 report "UK at centre of secret $3bn Azerbaijani money laundering and lobbying scheme." This investigative article by Luke Harding, Caelainn Barr, and Dina Nagapetyants cited questionable payments to Bokova’s husband. In 2016, after a "renovation" that significantly altered the original structure, the Azerbaijani authorities reopened the formerly Russian church as a "temple-museum" to, in part, use its interior for displaying photos of nearby Islamic monuments, followed by Azerbaijan’s state media’s praise of the conversion as a testament to "multiculturalism and tolerance." St

The allegedly damaged portion of the gas pipeline to Artsakh remains under Azerbaijani control. In addition, according to Ina McCabe’s Orientalism in Early Modern France, many of Europe’s first cafés were founded by these Djulfa (Julfan) merchants in the seventeenth century - contributing to a culture that, as Adam Gopnik writes in The New Yorker’s last issue of 2018, "helped lay the foundation for the liberal Enlightenment." Save for appropriated Armenian folklore linking the region to the Biblical Noah, whose ark was said to have landed on nearby Mount Ararat, Nakhichevan’s Armenian past has all but been erased. Each new argument of the anti-Armenian revisionism, writes Schnirelmann, "inflamed the imagination of the Azerbaijani authors." In 1975, for instance, a Soviet Azerbaijani construction project demolished the ancient Holy Trinity church, the site of Arab invaders’ mass burning of Armenian noblemen in 705 CE. The allegedly damaged portion of the gas pipeline to Artsakh remains under Azerbaijani control. By cutting off the gas pipeline to the population of Artsakh, firing at residents frequently, and still illegally holding Armenian prisoners of war in its jails, the Azerbaijani government appears to aim to ethnically cleanse the region of indigenous Armenians by destroying their peaceful life and violently forcing them to flee their ancestral lands. According to an Azerbaijani historian, who requested anonymity, many among modern Nakhichevan’s almost half-million population (virtually all of whom are Muslim), are devastated by the recent disappearance of the area’s Christian heritage. Leaving Azerbaijan was necessary, Nagorno-Karabakh’s majority-Armenian population claimed, to preserve the region’s indigenous Christian past and to avoid the fate of Nakhichevan’s vanished Armenians. Outside observers have typically interpreted the Aliyev regime’s erasure of Nakhichevan’s Armenian Christian heritage solely as a vengeful legacy of the bloody Nagorno-Karabakh war, but Armenian scholars and Azerbaijani dissidents have several additional theories of their own

Today, Nakhichevan’s sole "surviving" Christian site is what the Azerbaijani authorities call the "Ordubad Temple," the former St. According to a review of court documents, Hüseyin Büyükfırat, former IHH representative for Should you loved this post and you would love to receive more details regarding escort diyarbakır generously visit the website. 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 Australian Catholic University’s former Julfa Cemetery Digital Repatriation Project, the brainchild of Judith Crispin, aimed to virtually recreate Djulfa with 3D imaging technologies. Daniels, who has testified before the US Congress about issues of cultural destruction, notes that expert conservation efforts must begin with at least some material remains, however small. • On March 7, Azerbaijani forces opened fire on Armenian soldiers in several spots along the buffer zones, which resulted in the death of at least one Armenian soldier

A Yazidi-Armenian soldier, Kyaram Sloyan, for instance, was decapitated by Azerbaijani soldiers during Azerbaijan’s war against Artsakh in 2016. Videos and pictures showing Azerbaijani soldiers posing with Sloyan’s severed head were posted on social media. The Azerbaijani allegations, which claim the destruction of hundreds of mosques, religious schools, cemeteries and museums in the Shusha, Yerevan, Zangazur and Icmiadzin districts of Armenia, have undoubtedly compounded the reluctance of international organisations to get involved in a situation described to The Art Newspaper by Guido Carducci, the head of Unesco’s International Standards Section, as "a political hot potato". 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