Following Azerbaijan’s September 2023 expulsion of more than 100,000 of the indigenous Armenian population, the UN received documents confirming that its predecessor, the League of Nations, had secured Armenian sovereignty over Nagorno-Karabakh.

YEREVAN, ARMENIA, February 25, 2024 /24-7PressRelease/ — In 2008, the Institute of International Law, with the support of businessman and philanthropist Ara Abramyan, Founder of the Ararat Alliance Forum, published a multi-volume historical study “Nagorno-Karabakh in International Law and World Politics: Documents and Commentaries.” https://sarinfo.org

The study provides indisputable historical evidence that Nagorno-Karabakh has not only been a primordially Armenian land for thousands of years, but also reasonable confirmation that, from an international legal point of view, it never belonged to Azerbaijan.

During the collapse of the USSR, the people of the Nagorno-Karabakh Republic voted in a referendum in 1988 for their independence, and for 30 years the NKR existed as a de facto independent, although not recognized, state.

The modern Republic of Azerbaijan, during the collapse of the USSR, in 1991 declared itself the legal successor not of Soviet Azerbaijan, into which Vladimir Lenin included Nagorno-Karabakh, but of the Azerbaijan Democratic Republic (ADR), created in 1918 and which existed for less than two years.

There are documents in the UN archives indicating that the Azerbaijan Democratic Republic was at one time denied admission to the League of Nations precisely because it claimed illegal rights to Karabakh, which, as part of the territory of Armenia, is mentioned in the reference note of James Eric Drummond, Secretary General of the League of Nations, March 1921.

It follows from it that the League of Nations on the issue of the territorial affiliation of Karabakh considered this region as a territory originally belonging to Armenia. Accordingly, following the review of the Armenian-Azerbaijani territorial delimitation by the League of Nations, it was confirmed that independent Azerbaijan has no rights to the territory of Nagorno-Karabakh.

Ara Abramyan, a long-time UNESCO Goodwill Ambassador since 2003, also drew the attention of the UN and UNESCO to the critical threat looming over the cultural and historical heritage sites of Nagorno-Karabakh. The enclave is a real open-air museum, thanks to more than 500 unique monuments of ancient and Christian culture located on its territory. (www.museumofthebible.org/location/ancient-faith-the-churches-of-nagorno-karabakh)

Azerbaijan announced plans to create a working group to change the identity of these monuments – the so-called “restoration of Albanian religious temples”, i.e. Albanization of Armenian churches by erasing ancient Armenian inscriptions from them.

“This, in essence, is an act of state vandalism, comparable in its cynicism to the Taliban’s shooting of the Bamiyan Buddha statues in Afghanistan, and a civilizational challenge to all humanity and international institutions, including the UN,” Abramyan emphasized. “This is also a direct disregard for a number of international documents, including the requirement issued by the International Court of Justice on December 7, 2021 for Azerbaijan to take the necessary measures to prevent all acts of vandalism committed against the Armenian cultural heritage and to punish the perpetrators.” (www.icj-cij.org/public/files/case-related/180/180-20211207-PRE-01-00-EN.pdf)

A clear illustration of how Baku deals with the cultural heritage of the Armenian people after their expulsion from its historical lands is the Nakhichevan Autonomous Republic, part of Azerbaijan, where by 2007 the destruction of the cultural and historical trace was finally completed and not only representatives of the Armenian people remained , which made up 75 percent of the population, but also Armenian temples, museums, necropolises and cemeteries. The same thing happened with 105 once-Armenian-populated villages, whose names were replaced with Azerbaijani ones, and all traces of centuries-old Armenians living there were erased from the face of the earth.

On January 4, 2024 the US State Department added Azerbaijan to the US List of Religious Freedom Offenders, citing its treatment of Christians, Muslims, and ethnic Armenians displaced from the Nagorno-Karabakh enclave.

“Considering that the issue of preserving the Armenian factor and world cultural heritage in Nagorno-Karabakh is not so much a matter of politics or geopolitics, but rather a universal human problem, a matter of a fair world order, preservation and transmission to future generations of the cultural code of humanity,” Abramyan wrote in his address to the Secretary General UN, “I request that a special UN conference be convened with the participation of historians and international law experts to consider the historical and legal right of Armenians to sovereignty in Nagorno-Karabakh, and to discuss mechanisms of international law to protect the cultural Christian heritage of Nagorno-Karabakh from the barbaric actions of the Baku regime.”

THE ARARAT ALLIANCE FORUM (https://araratalliance.am/en) is an Armenian NGO conducting historical, economic, strategic and cultural studies to help advance democratic development and strengthen national security of Armenia. The First Ararat Alliance Forum was held in June 2022 in Yerevan.

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