Anatomy of robbery - what the Armenian opposition is "proud of"

The harsh speech delivered by President Ilham Aliyev in Zangilan on May 10 was listened to very carefully in neighboring Armenia, where the election campaign is underway.

Those who romanticize and idealize the "heroism", "humanism", "creativity" and other qualities of the occupiers are terribly outraged. They did not like that they were, roughly speaking, stuck in the dirt, which, instead of romance, accompanied the Armenian aggression and the years of occupation. Our neighbors, in fact, have absolutely nothing to be proud of. Is it possible to be proud of what the invaders have done on Azerbaijani lands? One must have an extremely perverted imagination to see romance in ethnic cleansing, total destruction and desecration of graves. You don't have to have any morals to be proud of the crimes against humanity committed by the Armenian separatists and occupiers over the past thirty years. And you also need to have boundless shamelessness in order to commit so many atrocities and try to demonize your neighbor.

Much of the Azerbaijani President's speech struck a chord with the revanchists. These figures have a very delicate mental organization, they are very easy to offend. Especially the truth. Our neighbors are always offended when the Azerbaijani side reminds them of their black deeds during the years of military aggression and subsequent occupation. They don't want to hear about genocide, ethnic cleansing, vandalism, looting. When they are reminded of this, the entire revanchist fraternity rears up, starts waving their arms and, spluttering saliva, threatening Baku with international courts. Having such a bloody background as that of the Armenians, one should swallow one's tongue, but the habit is stronger. The neighbors are used to blaming those who suffered from their actions for their crimes. The whole world is talking about the "Armenian genocide", although in fact the victims of the genocide were just the peaceful Turkish population. Now they want the whole world to cry about the "genocide of 2023", and instead the world listens to what Baku says.

What Baku says needs to be known not so much to the world as to the Armenian people themselves, deceived by propaganda tinsel. The older generation of citizens of the neighboring country knows perfectly well that Baku is telling the truth. This truth is not told to young people who continue to be proud of the bloody deeds of their fathers. But in vain. This is difficult, and it will inevitably lead to certain national-scale complexes, but the Armenian society will have to go through this stage of reconciliation with reality. In the end, everything will get better, and the truth about what the "winners" were doing after the "restoration of historical justice" will no longer cause hysterical denial.

It was the hysterical denial that caused the truth about the looting of Armenians in the occupied territories of Azerbaijan. The Head of State said that every nation has good and bad people, but the overall picture is as follows: "Zangilan was razed to the ground not only by the leaders of Armenia, not only by Karabakh separatists. Almost their entire population came here en masse and engaged in looting. They even said, "We're going to rob." That is, it was their rule, it was normal behavior. That is, wildness was normal behavior - who would steal the most stones, who would take out how many window frames or roofing materials. Then they brought it and sold it in the markets of both Iran and Armenia. That's the difference. Could we do that? Our people wouldn't even think of that."

And so it was. The massive looting that befell the lands of Azerbaijan occupied by Armenia during and after the First Karabakh War probably knows no equal in scale and cynicism. The invaders dragged everything that had been abandoned by the fleeing Azerbaijanis, from bricks and furniture to towels and cutlery. They were dragged not only by separatists and armed gangs, but also by ordinary Armenian citizens who came by truck to the occupied lands specifically for the purpose of looting. It was a common occurrence.

Let's continue with examples.

After the Khojaly genocide, Russian journalist Ivleeva was allowed into the city by the Armenians and filmed what was happening there. Her camera caught men carrying bales of Khojaly residents' property. These are residents of neighboring Armenian villages who were waiting for the city to be cleared of residents in order to enter and rob quietly. No one bothers them, because it's a common thing for them.

One of the Armenian social media users named Sevak, who fought in the First Karabakh War, once wrote that during the occupation of Shusha in May 1992, the invaders who entered the city saw Armenian looters who were already actively looting abandoned houses. The looters entered the city even before the armed gangs and calmly did their job while the battle was going on. This scene made a strong impression on poor Sevak. Therefore, he writes openly and reminds us that after the occupation, the Armenians looted the largest irrigation system in the South Caucasus, dismantled the railway tracks, and sold them for scrap.

It is significant that the habit of looting affects not only the hated Azerbaijanis, but also their own tribesmen. Thus, when leaving Kalbajar and Lachin, the Armenians who illegally lived there plundered the houses of their neighbors. Blogger Vartan Ghukasyan posted a video of looted Armenian houses before the liberation of Lachin. The blogger admitted that he was shocked. Robbery, he said, was putting it mildly. A robbery is called when electrical equipment, gold and money are taken out of houses. "But I do not know what word to find for the fact that windows, doors, tiles and toilets were taken out of houses. There is no definition of this in any language. And the most important thing is that it was not the Turks (Azerbaijanis - ed.) who did it, but the Armenians themselves! As soon as they heard that Berdzor (Lachin) was being rented, they rushed to empty the houses. They didn't even realize that Armenians still live in these houses," Ghukasyan was horrified, admitting that there are "a lot of scum among the Armenians, the number of which continues to increase."

The same thing happened in Kalbajar before the Armenians left the area. Armenian journalists and bloggers wrote about it with shock, although it is unclear what shocked them so much. If looters have destroyed all Azerbaijani settlements in the occupied territories for 27 years, then why don't they take the property of their tribesmen if it is badly stored? The Armenian media wrote about the looting recorded in Kalbajar as a "disgusting phenomenon." And the most interesting thing is that Armenians who came from neighboring Vardenis also participated in this event specifically in order to have time to profit from other people's goods before joining the Kalbajar Azerbaijani Army.

The nationalists were very offended by the story of journalist Natalie Aleksanyan. She once shared her memories of her childhood during the first war. She herself witnessed how, after the occupation, the villagers of Armenia drove trucks to the occupied Azerbaijani lands in order to plunder the villages abandoned by the Azerbaijanis. She admitted that she still does not understand why her tribesmen took everything from the houses of Azerbaijanis, down to the dishes. She also does not understand how graves could be desecrated and destroyed, how corpses could be dug up in search of gold.

We don't understand it either, and we never will.

Shocking facts also occurred after the catastrophic earthquake in Armenia in 1988. The looters were here before anyone else, before the rescuers and the military. We won't say anything, just give quotes from eyewitness accounts published in the Russian media over the years.:

"Looters are prowling in houses abandoned by people. They caught one in front of me, almost trampled to death. The military barely recaptured it. The worst thing is that not only houses are being robbed, but also the dead."

"No one was really there yet, neither rescuers nor the military, they entered the city only two days later. But looters were already scurrying through the ruins."..

The neighbors would very much like to respond to what the Azerbaijani leader said in Zangilan in substance. But this is impossible, because the Azerbaijanis behaved differently. Azerbaijani soldiers did not plunder houses abandoned by Armenians during the 44-day war. Residents of Azerbaijani villages were in no hurry to steal the property of Armenians. As the President said, there are both good and bad people in every nation. The family is not without a freak. The main thing is that this ugliness does not turn into a part of the national idea.

And that's exactly what happened in Armenia. How, when, and why is not our concern.