A letter about  destruction of Ghazanchetsots Cathedral in Shushi  sent to UNESCO

ArmInfo.Minister of Education, Science, Culture and Sports of Armenia Arayik Harutyunyan sent a letter to the Director General of UNESCO, in which he pointed  out the facts of shelling by the Azerbaijani armed forces of the Holy  Savior Ghazanchetsots Cathedral in Shushi.

<On October 8 at least twice, the masterpiece of the Armenian  architecture - iconic Holy Savior Ghazanchetsots Cathedral located in  the cultural capital of Artsakh, Shushi, was targeted and shelled by  the air forces of the Republic of Azerbaijan, causing significant  damages. One of the bombardments took place during the visit of  foreign journalists who were reporting the earlier shelling. Three  journalists got injured during second attack of church in Shushi.  Since September 27, 2020 Azerbaijan has been conducting a military  offensive along the entire line of contact between Nagorno-Karabakh  and Azerbaijan and in the direction of state border with Armenia.

There are approximately 4,000 monuments on the territory of Artsakh,  all of which are under threat. As international media outlets  reported recently, Azerbaijan has also shelled the 2,000-year-old  archaeological city of Tigranakert, a major site of Hellenistic and  Early Medieval Armenian civilizations. The deliberate destruction of  cultural heritage constitutes a war crime. Targeting cultural  heritage sites, especially in war situations, is strictly prohibited  by a number of international conventions, including the UNESCO Hague  Convention for the Protection of Cultural Property in the Event of  Armed Conflict and its two.  Unfortunately, when Azerbaijan erased  the entire Armenian cultural heritage of Nakhichevan between  1997-2006, it didn't receive appropriate condemnation from UNESCO.  That silence resulted in the erasure of 89 medieval churches, 5,840  khachkars and 22,000 tombstones. 

This systematic destruction is consistent with the Azerbaijani  government's relentless persecution of Armenians' Christian identity  and, therefore, targets not only an ethnic group but also a religion.  Contrary to the Azerbaijani authorities' policy of state-sponsored  cultural destruction and unfounded accusations against the Armenian  side, Armenia and Artsakh have consistently and unconditionally  pursued long-term positive peacebuilding measures through cultural  preservation. In 2019, for example, in cooperation with the Artsakh  Government, IdeA Foundation conducted the restoration of the Gyovhar  Agha (Verin Juma) mosque in Shushi. Azerbaijan's October 8, 2020  shelling of Shushi's Holy Savior Ghazanchetsots Cathedral was not  Azerbaijan's first abuse of that major cultural site. After deporting  the local Armenian community in 1988 1998, the Azerbaijani  authorities demolished the Cathedral's relief carvings, turned the  church into an arsenal, and during the 1990s Karabakh war used it as  the warehouse of the Azerbaijani authorities' GRAD missile launcher  system, effectively converting one of the most sacred sites for the  Armenian people into a physical source of death for nearby civilians.

We call upon UNESCO and all other relevant organizations to urgently  and unequivocally condemn Azerbaijan's continuous aggression and  targeting of cultural heritage sites and other cultural and civilian  infrastructures. We are convinced, that the timely actions by UNESCO  and other world-leading organizations will allow to stop the further  destruction of cultural monuments and civilian infrastructures in  Artsakh>.