Many observers have seen the recent conflicts between Azerbaijan and Armenia as a revival of the dark days of the Armenian Genocide of the early twentieth century, when the Ottoman government pursued the systematic extermination of 1.5 million Armenians, mostly Ottoman citizens within the Ottoman Empire and its successor state, the Republic of Turkey, as well as over 1,000,000 Greek Orthodox Christians and 300,000 Assyrian Christians. The similarity between the Armenian Genocide and recent events was also evidenced in Azerbaijan’s targeting of churches.
“COP29 Host Azerbaijan Accused of ‘Greenwashing’ Ancient Christian Territory,” International Christian Concern, November 11, 2024:
11/11/2024 Azerbaijan (International Christian Concern) — The COP29 climate change conference started today in Azerbaijan, a country known for its recent ethnic cleansing of Armenian Christians. The U.N. conference is underway in the capital city of Baku just 14 months after Azerbaijan started ethnically cleansing the historically Christian territory of Nagorno-Karabakh. Delegates from nearly 200 countries, including the U.S., are attending the summit. In September 2023, the Azerbaijani military launched a lightning offensive in the territory after a nine-month blockade. The offensive caused roughly 120,000 people, nearly the entire population of Nagorno-Karabakh, to flee to neighboring Armenia. The Armenian people are known as the first “Christian nation,” having converted to Christianity in A.D. 306. Until 2023, Armenians had lived in Nagorno-Karabakh since at least the first century. Today, the territory is virtually devoid of Christians. Caucus Heritage Watch has reported for months on the Azerbaijani military destroying Armenian churches and cemeteries, while Bellingcat, a Netherlands-based investigative journalism collective, recently released satellite evidence of the “ransacking” of Nagorno-Karabakh’s capital, Stepanakert. The driving out of the Armenian population and destruction of ancient and medieval Christian sites has caused human rights advocates to label Azerbaijan’s actions as “ethnic cleansing.”… Aram Hamparian, executive director of the Armenian National Convention of America, said in a statement, “Having faced no accountability for its genocidal ethnic cleansing of Artsakh, it is incumbent on world leaders to use the COP29 summit as an opportunity to scrutinize Azerbaijan’s egregious human rights record — and confront efforts by its genocidal regime to greenwash its war crimes and atrocities.”…
