Armenian speaker's allegations get backlash from Baku Attempts to disguise Armenian cultural vandalism

Armenian leaders should end false rhetoric and respect Azerbaijan’s sovereignty, said Aykhan Hajizada, a Spokesperson for the Foreign Ministry of Azerbaijan.

Hajizada's remarks came in response to allegations by the Armenian Speaker Alen Simonyan about the removal of the scripts on a World War II monument in Lachin City.

"Another aggressive rhetoric & falsification by Armenian leadership," Hajizada wrote on Twitter. "It was Armenia, who destroyed the WWII monument by erasing all the bas-reliefs dedicated to WWII and pasting inscriptions related to the occupation of Lachin and a list of Armenian terrorists burned it in May 1992."

He also accused Simonyan of disrespecting the territorial integrity of Azerbaijan.

"Armenian Speaker and closer associate of the Prime Minister (a PM who recognised Azerbaijan’s sovereignty and territorial integrity) calls Lachin, Azerbaijan’s ancient town, as “Berdzor,” inflicting another attack on Azerbaijan’s sovereignty," Hajizada stated.

Cultural vandalism by Armenia was common in the once-occupied Azerbaijani territories, and footage depicting the mass destruction of the monuments during the years of occupation went viral after the liberation of the territories. Affected sites included mosques, memorials, museums, statues and more. The city of Aghdam, where the world’s Bread Museum was located, as well as the city of Fuzuli, was completely razed to the ground, resembling ghost towns.

A part of Azerbaijan’s sovereign territory fell under Armenia's occupation in a war that ensued from the latter's illegal claims to historical Azerbaijani lands. Following the dissolution of the Soviet Union, Armenia launched a full-fledged armed attack on Azerbaijan's Karabakh region. The bloody war in 1991-1994 resulted in Armenia occupying 20 per cent of the internationally recognized territories of Azerbaijan.

Over 30,000 ethnic Azerbaijanis were killed, and one million others were expelled from those lands in a brutal ethnic cleansing policy conducted by Armenia. The houses, cemeteries, religious sites, and social infrastructure left after the expulsion of indigenous Azerbaijanis were subjected to unforeseen vandalism by Armenians accompanied by mass destructions and plunder.

On September 27, 2020, the Armenia-Azerbaijan conflict took a violent turn when Armenia’s forces deployed in occupied Azerbaijani lands shelled military positions and civilian settlements of Azerbaijan. During counter-attack operations that lasted 44 days, Azerbaijani forces liberated over 300 settlements, including the cities of Jabrayil, Fuzuli, Zangilan, Gubadli, and Shusha, from nearly 30-year-long illegal Armenian occupation. The war ended with a tripartite statement signed by Armenia, Azerbaijan, and Russia on November 10, 2020. Under the agreement, Armenia also returned the occupied Aghdam, Kalbajar, and Lachin districts to Azerbaijan.

According to data compiled by the Ministry of Culture of Azerbaijan, based on the statistics from the early 1990s, some 2,625 monuments were registered in the occupied territories, of which 706 were protected by the state. Hundreds of cultural institutions, including 927 libraries with 4.6 million books, 808 palaces of culture, clubs, and houses of culture, 85 music and art schools, 22 museums and museum branches with more than 100,000 exhibits, four art galleries, four theatres, two concert halls, eight cultural and recreation parks have been destroyed and looted.

One of the world’s oldest human settlements in the Khojavend district - the Azykh cave; the Shusha State Historical-Architectural Reserve and Govhar Agha Mosque in the same city, Aghdam's Bread Museum and Drama Theater, hundreds of other mosques, cultural and social infrastructure buildings in Lachin, Aghdam, Fuzuli, Jabrayil, Zangilan, Gubadli, and other districts have been targeted by Armenian vandalism, as well. Mosques were transformed into barns for pigs and cattle during Armenia's occupation of Azerbaijani territories.

Aghdam is dubbed "Hiroshima of the 21st Century" and "Hiroshima of the Caucasus" by international journalists and researchers.