in Russian – https://aga-tribunal.info/babayan-12-2-2022/

in Armenian – https://armenpress.am/arm/news/1075426.html

Source: Armenpress, February 12, 2022.

The initiative of the culture ministry of Azerbaijan to present the Armenian churches in the occupied territories of Artsakh as “Aghvan” and eliminate the Armenian notes and other Armenian traces from these churches for this reason is a cultural genocide against the Armenian historical-cultural heritage, Foreign Minister of Artsakh Davit Babayan told reporters at a briefing in Yerevan.

“Of course, it’s a cultural genocide. In general, the cultural genocide is carried out in different ways. The one is just a primitive barbarism: our monuments, churches, tombstones and other cultural monuments are being destoyed, and the second one is that an attempt is made to deprive those cultural monuments of Armenians. This is also a genocide. In other words, they brought the thesis of the so-called “Aghvan churches”. This is, of course, absurdity. This is done when they are unable to demolish these churches, say Dadivank. As they are unable to do so, they are trying to eliminate the Armenian identity of these cultural monuments in another way and turn them a monument of non-Armenian culture”, the Artsakh FM said.

He emphasized the need that the civil world must react to this. “Of course, we will continue fighting against this. Firstly, we need to unite, recover from all of these and run a right geopolitics”, he added.