Armenia’s scorched earth strategy against Azerbaijani lands, monuments

By Azernews

By Fuad Muxtar-Aqbabali, political expert

Armenia’s independence remains in limbo with all state and public institutions in disarray and filled with resentment and enmity against Azerbaijan. When the Soviet Union fell, Armenia did not miss the opportunity to push yet for another phase of intervention against Azerbaijani lands that has resulted in the current state. Armenians encroached on lands, whose natives back in early XIX century displayed hospitality and gave refuge, shared bread and salt with those moved to Azerbaijani lands to sow the seeds of current enmity and aggression.

Attacking villages and towns, the Armenian military did not only kill innocent people but also pursued a scorched-earth strategy designed to make areas unlivable for inhabitants. Today every town and village in the occupied Azerbaijani lands has been totally flattened. There is hardly a building with a roof left on it. Empty districts, villages with all the houses and facilities, pocked by gunfire and artillery, lie in ruin. Atrocities carried out against civilians explain supremacist mind-set of Armenians. The whole of Nagorno-Karabakh and surrounding districts have been razed to the ground.

However, Armenians also left their barbaric trace on Azerbaijani monuments of architecture in the ancient city of Iravan, now Yerevan - capital of Armenia. This city was handed over to Armenians 99 years ago to turn it to the capital city. Since then, all the monuments of the Azerbaijani architecture were wiped off the face of the earth in the present-day Armenia.

Armenia has been turned into the mono-ethnic country in the Caucasus, and this is nonsense against the background of a colorful ethnic map of the Caucasus, where even neighboring villages speak different languages. Surrounded on four sides by multinational Iran, Turkey, Georgia and Azerbaijan, the mono-ethnic Armenia looks like a stain, which is an undeniable proof of the past ethnic cleansings against the Muslim population there.

And today this country, where there is not a single Turk, or an Azerbaijani, accuses neighboring Turkey of genocide of Armenians, while tens of thousands of Turkish citizens of Armenian origin and the same number of illegal immigrants from Armenia work and prosper safely in Turkey. Moreover, Armenia has territorial claims on Turkey, if only because Ararat Mountain in eastern Turkey flaunts its coat of arms, and this confuses millions of people who mistakenly think that Ararat is in Armenia, though this is a mountain in Turkey and this fact is already shouting about Armenia’s forgery.

Such forgeries are many in history, in culture, in the cooking of Armenia and unfortunately, millions of people become victims of this kind of counterfeit facts, primarily due to TV stations and all other media outlets. The problem is that the largest Russian TV channels and others around the world do not even suspect which network of lies they fall and take at face value the purest Armenian forgery.

A new phase of vandalism and obnoxious ethnic cleansing against Azerbaijani monuments and toponyms in Soviet Armenia was kicked off in 1946 at the hands of the Soviet Russia. It was simultaneous and total obliteration of absolutely all signs of Azerbaijanis: people, toponyms, architecture and history, to name a few.

The ethnic cleansing of place names represented the process of changing Azerbaijani toponyms into Armenian ones, and this process lasted until the beginning of the XXI century. In order to see this, it is enough to look at the Soviet encyclopedic dictionary, for example, Hrazdan used to be called Zangi, Stepanavan – Calaloglu.

The famous Lake Sevan - Goyca, which means "beautiful" in Azerbaijan, and the city of Stepanakert, now under occupation of Armenian hawkish nationalists, was historically called Xankandi, a village of a khan - noble man - in Azerbaijani.

What is good is that this information is preserved in encyclopedias and the basic role in this regard was played by the fact that after the abolition of the Iravan khanate and the creation of the Armenian region in early 1829, Gen Paskevich instructed the collegiate assessor Chopin to conduct a census of the population of the Armenian region. This census showed the numerical superiority of the Azerbaijani population over the Armenians. Also thanks to this, Azerbaijani toponyms were preserved; otherwise they would have been unambiguously destroyed without a trace in the Soviet Armenia.

The ethnic cleansing of Azerbaijanis started in 1828 after the mass migration of Armenians from Iran and Turkey to Iravan, Naxcivan and Karabakh khanates. Immediately, in his most genuine note to the emperor, Griboyedov drew his attention to bullying of the local Muslim population.

The latent genocide of Azerbaijanis continued even after Soviet Armenia was established on the native Azerbaijani lands in November 1920. And in 1947 and 1948, two edicts of Soviet tyrant Stalin were issued "on the deportation of Azerbaijanis from their historical lands". This was an unprecedented case for the USSR, and that's why under Stalin, whole nations that seemed unreliable to “the leader of the peoples” were deported to Siberia.

As for Azerbaijanis, they were not all guilty, but only those who lived in Armenia, and not those in Azerbaijan, or in Georgia. And this means that the heads of the communist regime deliberately purged Armenia from the Azerbaijanis. Another unique fact is that Armenia was the only republic where, in contrast to all other republics, the second secretary of the central committee of the party was not an ethnic Russian, but an Armenian though the second person in the leadership of the USSR was Anastas Mikoyan. This significantly weakened the Kremlin supervision and thanks to this, even in the Soviet Armenia where only Armenians were in power uncontrollably flourished vandalism and ethnic cleansing of Azerbaijanis was carried out systematically.

As for the ethnic cleansing of architecture, today there is no ancient Azerbaijani city of Iravan - there is the capital of Armenia - Yerevan, the new city that has lost its individuality. Hawkish Armenian nationalism is dangerous because it can destroy other's centuries-old culture. The Armenian nationalists are dangerous because they are able to draw third countries into their provocations against Azerbaijan.

In the meantime, facts are stronger than the Armenian lies and provocations and namely historical facts, ancient sources and geographical maps prove that such a country as Armenia has never existed in the Caucasus before. That is why ancient chroniclers called their works not "History of Armenia" but "History of Armenians". It was in the Soviet times when the history of the newly-formed in 1920 Armenian republic was invented. They began to falsify names of these chronicles and publish them with a distorted title, like "History of Armenia".

For these falsifications, the so-called historical science of official Yerevan differs radically from the armenology of Europe and of the USA. Western scholars of even Armenian origin, unlike the scientists of the Republic of Armenia, rely solely on those credible documents that are contrary to the interests of the Armenian counterfeiters. American armenologists adhering to the truth in their writings consider Anatolia the territory of Turkey, which the world is accustomed to call Armenia, and for this reason, in modern Armenia, influential U.S. professors are subjected to severe obstruction.

The geographical concept of Armenia has always applied only to Minor Asia, and not to the Caucasus, and this historical truth concealed under heaps of falsifications must be brought home to the world community