This week a scandalous video was published on the web, in which journalist Narine Kirakosyan demonstrates ruins of Muslim cemetery in the Ararat region of Armenia. Kirakosyan came to this area to shoot a report on the Wildlife and Cultural Property Protection Fund and was outraged that the fund’s employees kept the old cemetery in such a state.
"If this Fund's goal is preservation of cultural heritage and nature, then why does this cemetery remain destroyed, even if Kurds or Turks don't live here? This is a matter of international level - this is definitely an act of barbarism. Kurds are gone, and the cemetery is being destroyed. Why are these cemeteries destroyed?" she asked the staff of the Fund, but they told her to stop filming.
This is another evidence that demostrates that Armenia continues policy of war with the past, policy of extermination of non-Armenian cultural monuments. Formally, the regime in the country has changed, and the clan of ultranationalists who unleashed the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict was removed from power, but official Yerevan is still working on destroying any traces of other peoples on the territory of Armenia and in the occupied lands of Azerbaijan.
As editor-in-chief of the National Defense magazine Igor Korotchenko noted in an interview with Vestnik Kavkaza, such government policy should be condemned. "From humanitarian and human point of view, these incidents are horrible, so I would like to hear reaction from the new government of Armenia, headed by Nikol Pashinyan, to this event. Armenia, as a country that declares its commitment to humanitarian values, should at least respect them in practice, and not just in words," he stressed.
"Occupied regions of Azerbaijan have been looted, plundered, destroyed - objects of cultural heritage, mosques, and the city are in deplorable state. We must deal with this problem, especially with what is happening in the seven districts of Azerbaijan, occupied by Armenia about humanitarian situation with property, cities and cultural monuments, which, in my opinion, deserves reaction of international expert community," Igor Korotchenko said.
MP of Milli Majlis, political scientist Rasim Musabekov recalled that extermination of other cultures in Armenia has been carried out for a long time everywhere. "Armenia seeks to erase all cultural traces of other peoples. If you take a map of the General Staff of Russia of the 19th century, then all mountains, rivers, cities and towns in the territory of present-day Armenia have Turkic and Azerbaijani names - but all of this has been changed. All traces of Muslim cultures are being systematically destroyed, starting with the Khan’s palace in Yerevan, which was completely demolished. Everything that was associated with the historical period of the Turkic presence in this territory is being eliminated," he said.
