To this end, a special archaeological expedition was mounted to compile the list of the Armenian monuments to be obliterated. Later, Najaf Museyibli, deputy scientific director of the Institute of Archeology and Ethnography of the National Academy of Sciences of Azerbaijan, noted: “The expedition was created at the direct behest of Heydar Aliyev and worked until 2003”.439 He also notes that “there is not even the slightest trace of Armenians in the Southern Caucasus. In the Caucasus, since ancient times and to the present day, mass graves of a different anthropological type were found representing the ancestors of the Azerbaijani people. This land has never had any Armenian root whatsoever”.440
It should be specifically underscored that the operation of ultimately obliterating the traces of the Armenian ethnic and cultural presence was carried out by the units of the Azerbaijani army.441
In December 2005, the Azerbaijani regular troops smashed to pieces the khachkars of Jugha and loaded what remained of them into dump trucks. The trucks drove up to the riverbank and dumped the debris into the river. In a very short time, the medieval cemetery was flattened, and a military firing range was constructed in its place.
In 2006, the European Parliament formally exhorted Azerbaijan to halt the destruction in violation of the UNESCO Convention on the World Heritage;442 however, in the spring of the same year Baku debarred the commission of the European parliament from inspecting the site of the former cemetery.443 Charles Tannock, British spokesman in the European parliament, gave the following commentary of the events: “This is very similar to the Buddha statues destroyed by the Taliban. They have concreted the area over and turned it into a military camp. If they have nothing to hide then we should be allowed to inspect the terrain”.444 Nevertheless, the international community has long demonstrated а remarkable indifference to the obliteration of khachkars, while Yerevan’s appeal for sending a mission of observers to the site of destruction was barred.445
In 2006, the Institute for War and Peace Reporting (IWPR) published a report Azerbaijan: Famous Medieval Cemetery Vanishes,446 in which it confirmed that nothing had been left of the famous stone-crosses of Jugha.
Already in summer 2009, the Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev stated: “Nakhchivan is an ancient Azerbaijani land. For centuries, our people have lived and built on this splendid land. The historical and architectural monuments located in Nakhchivan show how great the talent of the Azerbaijani people is <…>. Nakhchivan gave Azerbaijan great personalities. Nakhchivan gave Azerbaijan the great leader Heydar Aliyev”.447
The historian Argam Ayvazyan, a specialist of Armenian monuments in Nakhijevan, notes that Jugha was a unique monument of medieval art and the largest of the existing Armenian cemeteries. There were unique tombstones in the form of ram heads, a church and the ruins of a massive stone bridge. The historian notes that nowhere in the world was there such a large concentration of thousands of khachkars in one place. “All over Nakhijevan, there were 27,000 monasteries, churches, khachkars, tombstones and other Armenian monuments. Today, they are all destroyed”, said Ayvazyan.448
Before XI century, Nakhijevan had as much as 218 Armenian Christian places of worship (monasteries, churches, chapels), 41 fortresses, 26 bridges, 4,500 khachkars and 23 thousands tombstones. In the early 1990s, the monasteries and churches in Agoulis, Aproukunis, Shorot, Krna and Tskhna, and in other Armenian-populated settlements of Nakhijevan were dynamited and razed to the ground.449
In the book entitled Architecture of ancient and early medieval Azerbaijan published in 1986, its author Davud Akhunov declares that all khachkars of Julfa in Nakhijevan are Albanian monuments.450 Nevertheless, even the declaration of these khachkars (tombstones) as Albanian heritage did not balk the Azerbaijani authorities from obliterating the medieval cemetery.
The Azerbaijani propaganda employs an identical artifice in respect of Armenian historical monuments in Artsakh. Specifically, the Azerbaijani side steadfastly ignores the existence of numerous Armenian records of donations on the walls of the Gandzasar monastery, to which the renowned art and architecture historian A. Jakobson refers to as the “encyclopedia of XIII century Armenian architecture”. They equally disregard the fact that the construction of the Gandzasar complex occurred in the XIII century, when Aghvank (Albania per the Azerbaijani version) had already ceased to exist as a state. Meanwhile, apart from the fact that the monastery was built in the Armenian architectural tradition, its founder Hasan Jalal was an Armenian as testified by medieval historians and evidenced by inscriptions on the monastery itself.
А remarkable example was recorded in 2004, when the Norwegian Humanitarian Enterprise, supported by the Norwegian ambassador in Baku Steiner Gil, decided to restore and renovate the St. Elisaeus Church built in 1823 in the village of Nij. The works had to be carried out by local Azerbaijani authorities.
The Norwegian ambassador gave the following account of the events: By the end of 2004 or early 2005, all Armenian inscriptions on the walls of the church or on the tombstones around it were erased with scraping equipment. The Norwegian embassy and the Norwegian Humanitarian Enterprise issued a joint press release voicing their protest against this act of vandalism. Restoration works were suspended for a while, but, after receiving a letter with apologies from the Udi community, Norwegian Humanitarian Enterprise agreed to resume the funding of the restoration works. Personally, I believe this apology is essentially unsatisfactory also because the apology was not been made public. In addition, no one has been held accountable for this act of vandalism. Together with the other ambassadors in Baku I was invited to the opening ceremony. I told my colleagues that because of the vandalism and the lack of appropriate response, no one from the Norwegian embassy would attend the opening ceremony. None of the ambassadors was present at the ceremony.451
The vandalism scandal was exposed on February 17, 2005 in the Worldwide Religious News magazine under the heading “Christian minority in Azerbaijan gets rid of the Armenian eye sore” covering the incident in detail.452
“We have no God, our people lost their religion under communism and this church is our only hope of reviving it,” said Georgi Kechaari, one of the village elders who doubles as the ethnic group’s historian. “But we live in Azerbaijan, and when people came into the church and saw Armenian letters, they automatically associated us with Armenians,” he said.
“The Udi, who once used the Armenian alphabet, have struggled to separate their legacy from that of their fellow Christians, the Armenians, who fought a war with Azerbaijan and have been vilified here. “It was a beautiful inscription, 200 years old, it even survived the war,” told Steinar Gil, Norway’s Ambassador to Azerbaijan. “This is an act of vandalism, and Norway in no way wants to be associated with it”.
“They think they have erased a reminder of being Armenian… instead they have taken away the chance to have a good image when the church is inaugurated,” said the director of the NHE in Azerbaijan, Alf Henry Rasmussen.
Another particularly illustrative example is the church in Dashkesan, which the authorities preferred to destroy, at the same time putting the blame for this on… Armenians.