Armenpress: What is your comment on the demolition of the Narimanyan Cemetery, a Christian cemetery in Baku, under the guise of motorway construction? According to those who had taken the photos and placed them on the internet, bulldozers literally destroyed the cemetery without even giving people a chance to re-bury the remains of their relatives.

Answer: Armenia’s Foreign Ministry condemns the demolition of the Narimanyan Cemetery. Such steps conform entirely with the Azerbaijani policy of destroying Armenian cultural monuments and any traces of Armenians in that country, and in fact represents an extension of that logic now leading to the abuse of the memory and history of other communities in Baku. Evidence of that is the wave of protests by local public organizations and representatives of ethnic minorities regarding the arbitrary destruction of cemeteries in Azerbaijan.  

We consider the demolition of the Narimanyan Cemetery to be the continuation of the policy that resulted in the complete decimation of the medieval Armenian cemetery stones – khachkars – in Jugha, in the Azerbaijani region of Nakhijevan. Here, international organizations, too, must share some guilt since they have for the last two years submitted to the artificially created obstacles of the Azerbaijanis, and have not demonstrated the will to send monitoring missions to Nakhijevan  to carry out their responsibilities.