BAKU, Azerbaijan, Sept. 6
Trend:
The US report on cemeteries destruction is prejudiced and biased, the Azerbaijani State Committee for Work with Religious Organizations said commenting on the part of the report of the US Commission on International Religious Freedom dated September 1, 2021, related to Azerbaijan, Trend reports.
"Recently, the US Commission on International Religious Freedom (USCIRF) has published a report entitled "Destruction of cemeteries". Unfortunately, against the background of the real attitude of the Azerbaijani side to the historical and religious heritage, including gravestone monuments, the report contains fabricated claims that don’t reflect the real situation, citing false information disseminated by Armenia,” the committee noted.
“Despite the fact that the report covers the period after 2018, the section on Azerbaijan repeats the "claims on Nakhchivan and Baku" dating back to the early 2000s years, and the vandalism of Armenia in relation to Azerbaijani cemeteries is mentioned superficially, and although the document has a separate subtitle called "Jewish cemeteries", it didn’t include information about the acts of vandalism against the memorial to the victims of the Holocaust and Jewish cemeteries in Armenia in 2020 and 2021,” the committee further said.
“We declare that in general, during the history of Azerbaijan's independence, not a single fact of the destruction of burials or cemeteries has been recorded. Even during the 44-day second Karabakh war [from late Sept. to early Nov.2020], the Azerbaijani Armed Forces hadn’t been shelling at Armenian civilian targets, including religious buildings. The fact has been repeatedly confirmed by foreign journalists,” the committee also reminded. “Although the report emphasizes that the destruction of graves and other places belonging to Azerbaijanis, the deliberate shelling of the cemetery by the Armenian armed forces during a funeral in the Tartar district during the last war, the death of four people, and the injury of four more were confirmed by Human Rights Watch, strangely, that this information was posted in the "Azerbaijan" section.
“All of the above and the absence of a section under the "Armenia" heading in the report is an indicator of how pro-Armenian and biased this material is. Unfortunately, the report doesn’t contain information about ethnic cleansing and genocide in the UN-recognized territories of Azerbaijan, which were held under occupation by Armenia for almost 30 years, the Armenianization of Azerbaijani toponyms, the destruction, along with hundreds of historical and cultural monuments, over 60 mosques, about 200 sanctuaries, desecration of religious values by Armenian side which kept cattle in dilapidated mosques, as well as the fact of Gregorianization or destruction of Christian churches belonging to the cultural heritage of Caucasian Albania or the Orthodox Church,” the committee said.
“It's no secret that during the occupation, the citizens of Azerbaijan were deprived of the opportunity to visit the graves of their relatives, and in total, more than 900 Azerbaijani cemeteries were either completely destroyed, or the remains of the deceased were removed from the graves, desecrated, and the gravestones were looted,” the committee pointed out. “By all these criminal acts, the opposing side grossly violated the "International Pact on Civil and Political Rights", the Hague Convention for the Protection of Cultural Property in the Event of Armed Conflict of May 14, 1954, the 1992 European Convention for the Protection of the Archaeological Heritage, the Convention for the Protection of the World and a UNESCO natural heritage from 1972, as well as a number of other international norms and standards.”
“Along with representatives of the diplomatic corps operating in our country, such organizations as ISESCO, the International Organization of Turkic Culture (TURKSOY), the Cooperation Council of Turkic-speaking States (Turkic Council), the International Fund for Turkic Culture and Heritage (TURKSOY), as well as foreign journalists while carrying out missions in the liberated territories visited a cemetery in Jabrayil district, which is an example of vandalism committed by Armenia against cemeteries, and made calls for the international community to condemn the Armenian atrocities they witnessed,” the committee noted.
“Unfortunately, during the 30-year occupation, some specialized international organizations were indifferent to this issue, despite the demands of the Azerbaijani side, and authoritative international organizations, including UNESCO, haven’t sent a mission to investigate these facts,” the committee said. “Immediately after the end of hostilities, President of the Republic of Azerbaijan Ilham Aliyev stated that all religious monuments destroyed by the armed forces of Armenia in the liberated territories will be restored, and on the instructions of the Azerbaijani president, on the basis of the Great Return program [on return of Azerbaijani IDPs to the liberated territories], a large-scale restoration process was launched on the basis of the plan for the socio-economic development of these territories. Along with state structures, the Heydar Aliyev Foundation also actively participates in the restoration process, and restoration projects are currently being successfully implemented.”
“Deeply regretting the prejudiced and biased information, we reiterate that having assumed the responsibility of analyzing and assessing the state of freedom of conscience in the world, the US Commission on International Religious Freedom has included some issues in the report without investigating them,” the committee added.
“The State Committee for Work with Religious Organizations of Azerbaijan again invites the US Commission on International Religious Freedom and other relevant bodies to cooperate in order to prepare more objective and accurate reports in this area in the future," concluded the committee.