Author: Mery Babayan

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Gilles Deleuze on Artsakh and the rights of Armenians for life

Source: https://medium.com/sev-bibar/gilles-deleuze-on-artsakh-and-the-rights-of-armenians-for-life-abb26fccfa79 We present you an excerpt from French television program called “L’Abécédaire de Gilles Deleuze” (“Gilles Deleuze’s alphabet book”), produced by Pierre-André Boutang in 1988–1989, consisting of an eight-hour series of interviews between Gilles Deleuze and Claire Parnet. In one of the interviews the French philosopher talks about Artsakh events and the rights of Armenians for life. “Take, the example of recent contemporary unrest in Armenia. What is the situation there to the best of my understanding? There is an enclave in another Soviet Republic. There is an Armenian enclave, and there is the Republic of Armenia…There is a […]

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Petition: Protect Armenian Cultural & Historical Sites in Artsakh

Source: Public petition, charge.org On November 10, Armenia, Russia, and Azerbaijan have signed a joint statement to end the war in Artsakh, that was going on for more than 40 days. This deal has forced Armenia to surrender to Azerbaijan most of the territories they had in Artsakh (their indigenous land for thousands of years). During the war, we had received many videos of Azerbaijani soldiers destroying cultural Armenian monuments while capturing cities, and the worldwide Armenian community is now concerned that when the Government of Azerbaijan get full control of the territories conceded in the deal, they will continue the […]

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Cultural cleansing in occupied Artsakh

Source: Lillian Avedian, Armenian Weekly, 31.03.2021 The BBC has documented the total destruction of a 19th-century Armenian church in the latest recorded incident of a systematic pattern of cultural genocide perpetrated by the Azerbaijani government against Armenian cultural heritage in the South Caucasus.  BBC correspondent Jonah Fisher traveled to the region of Jabrayil, an outlying territory of Artsakh that came under Azerbaijani control under the November 9 ceasefire agreement, to investigate the disappearance of Zoravor Surp Astvatsatsin Church (Armenian Holy Mother of God Church) in the village of Mekhakavan. Video footage from November proves that the church was intact immediately following the […]

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R. Lemkin and the concept of cultural genocide

Source: Donna-Lee Frieze (2013) New approaches to Raphael Lemkin, Journal of Genocide Research, 15:3, 247-252, DOI: 10.1080/14623528.2013.821219 Writing in 1948 before the adoption of the Genocide Convention, Toby Shafter argued that ‘if the Genocide law is adopted, Raphael Lemkin’s name will go down in history as a great lawgiver’. While ‘the group is endowed with a historical existence. . . its members enjoy only physical existence’, so biological destruction was added by delegates to the UN as an act of genocide to include the intention to destroy through sterilizations, castrations, prevention of births and mass restrictions of marriage. Thomas M. […]

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Foreign Ministry Spokesperson’s comment on the destruction of Zoravor Surb Astvatsatsin Church

Source: Official website of MFA RA Today, the BBC released a video documenting the demolition of the Zoravor Surb Astvatsatsin Church near the town of Mekhakavan (Jebrail), which took place after the region fell under the Azerbaijani control. The same church had already been desecrated during the recent Azerbaijani aggression against Artsakh. We strongly condemn this yet another case of a crime committed by Azerbaijan on the grounds of religious hatred. At the same time, the attempts of the Azerbaijani leadership to justify this barbarism are even more concerning, as it shows that this manifestation of vandalism was intentional in […]

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The AGMI’s Statement against the distortion of the ownership of Armenian cultural monuments

Source: The AGMI’s Statement against the distortion of the ownership of Armenian cultural monuments, 22.03.2021 The Armenian Genocide Museum-Institute strongly condemns another attempt made by Ilham Aliyev, President of Azerbaijan, to distort the ownership of Armenian cultural monuments. Ilham Aliyev, visiting the occupied territories of the Artsakh Republic including the 12th-century Surb Astvatsatsin (Holy Mother of God) Armenian Church in the village of Tsakuri in the Hadrut region in the last few days, made the following statement:“This is an Albanian church. The Armenians tried to make this church Armenian, they added inscriptions in Armenian here, but were not successful. This […]