In a resolution adopted late on Thursday, the European Union’s legislative body also called on Baku to drop “territorial claims on Armenia” and restart talks on determining Karabakh’s internationally recognized status.
The resolution was passed by 635 votes to 2, with 42 abstentions, one month after the Azerbaijani government announced plans to erase Armenian inscriptions from churches in areas retaken by Azerbaijan as a result of the 2020 war over Karabakh.
Azerbaijan’s Culture Minister Anar Kerimov claimed that the churches had been built by Caucasian Albania, an ancient kingdom that covered much of modern-day Azerbaijan’s territory. He set up a working group tasked with removing “false” Armenian traces from them.
Armenia condemned the move as an attempt to “illegally appropriate” Armenian cultural and religious heritage. The U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom, a federal government agency, similarly expressed serious concern about it.
The European Parliament also cited Kerimov’s decision. It said that “the elimination of the traces of Armenian cultural heritage in the Nagorno-Karabakh region is being achieved not only by damaging and destroying it, but also through the falsification of history and attempts to present it as so-called Caucasian Albanian.”
The Brussels-based parliament’s resolution strongly condemns “Azerbaijan’s continued policy of erasing and denying the Armenian cultural heritage in and around Nagorno-Karabakh.” The destruction of that heritage, it says, is “part of a wider pattern of a systematic, state-level policy of Armenophobia, historical revisionism and hatred towards Armenians promoted by the Azerbaijani authorities.”
Armenian officials say that at least two Armenian churches in Azerbaijani-controlled parts of Karabakh have been torn down since a Russian-brokered ceasefire stopped the six-week war in November 2020.
They have also accused Baku of vandalizing Karabakh’s Holy Savior Cathedral located in the Azerbaijani-controlled town of Shushi (Shusha). The 19th century Armenian church was stripped of its conical domes and covered in scaffolding a year ago. It was twice hit by long-range Azerbaijani missiles during the war.
There are also lingering concerns about the fate of the medieval Dadivank monastery located in the Kelbajar district just west of Karabakh.
Although the district was handed over to Azerbaijan shortly after the 2020 truce, Russian peacekeeping forces set up a permanent post at Dadivank to protect Armenian clergymen remaining there. For almost a year, the Azerbaijani side has not allowed the peacekeepers to escort Karabakh Armenian worshippers to the monastery for religious ceremonies.
Baku claims that Dadivank and just about every other church in the region is “Albanian.” Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev underlined this decades-long policy in March 2021 when he visited a medieval Armenian church in Karabakh’s southern Hadrut district captured by the Azerbaijani army. “All these inscriptions are fake, they were added later,” Aliyev claimed there.
In December, the International Court of Justice (ICJ) issued an “interim measure” ordering Azerbaijan to “prevent and punish acts of vandalism and desecration affecting Armenian cultural heritage.”
The European Parliament urged Baku to fully comply with the ICJ decision and also allow another United Nations body, UNESCO, to send a fact-finding mission to the region.
The parliament’s resolution also calls on Aliyev’s regime to “discard its maximalist aims, militaristic approach and territorial claims on Armenia and engage in good faith in negotiations under the auspices of the OSCE Minsk Group on the final status of Nagorno-Karabakh.”
Aliyev has repeatedly said that Azerbaijan’s victory in the 2020 war put an end to the Karabakh conflict. The United States and France, which co-head the Minsk Group together with Russia, maintain, however, that the conflict remains unresolved.
