In its annual report on religious freedoms in Azerbaijan, the US State Department addressed the preservation of Armenian and Azerbaijani historical and cultural monuments in Nagorno-Karabakh.
It cites the study published in April last year by Cornell University’s Caucasus Heritage Watch (CHW) program on the condition of 109 Azerbaijani historical-cultural monuments in Nagorno-Karabakh from 1994-2020 based on satellite images. The report states that during the period of Armenian control over the territory, “42 Azerbaijani cultural monuments remained unchanged, 39 were seriously damaged, 16 were destroyed, nine were slightly damaged, two were repaired, and one was restored.” The report states: “The CHW investigation found that both the claims of Azerbaijani officials about the near-total destruction of mosques in the region, as well as the counter-claims of the Armenian side that all the damage occurred during the Soviet years, are inaccurate.”
The State Department also cited a report published by CHW on June 22 that noted “alarming trends” that put cultural heritage sites in the Nagorno-Karabakh region at risk, including in areas returned to Azerbaijani control in 2020.
The document mentions the September 22 statement of the UN special rapporteur on cultural rights, according to which “Azerbaijan has continued its efforts to eliminate traces of the Armenian presence in Nagorno-Karabakh or present them as monuments belonging to Caucasian Albanians.” According to the official report, the special rapporteur reminded the concerns of the International Court of Justice, the European Parliament, and the Council of Europe regarding the replacement of the Armenian heritage with the Caucasian-Albanian “speech.” the vast majority of experts in the fields of culture and architecture in the region, according to the report, “rejected these revisionist claims as false.”
The State Department’s report highlights that on December 29, 2023, the US Secretary of State, relying on the International Religious Freedom Act of 1998, included Azerbaijan on the Religious Freedom Watch List, which is a list of countries of particular concern for “perpetrating gross violations of religious freedom or to tolerate them,” said the State Department’s religious freedom report this year.
