Report on Cultural Cleansing in Nakhichevan

2006-01-29

(I-Newswire) - Sim visited Nakhichevan, a historic Armenian region now under Azerbaijani control, in August of 2005. He was shocked by the state-sponsored destruction of the Armenian cultural heritage in Nakhichevan.

The Scot visitor was scrutinized and some of his photographs were deleted by Azerbaijani officials. He was reportedly told by the locals that there had never been Armenian churches in Nakhichevan. Sim writes:

“They asked me why I thought that there was a church in Shorut.

“Because a book had told me”, I said.“It is wrong, it is lying to you. It is an Armenian book, yes?”

“Yes” I replied.

“You see, Armenians are always lying – they are lying to everyone”.

I couldn’t resist pointing out to them that there were photographs of the Shurut church in the book. To this they responded by saying “Armenians, they came here and took photographs of Shurut village and then they went back to Armenia and put into them photographs of a church in Armenia.”

“It is all just Armenian lies. They are lying to you! There never were any Armenian churches anywherein Naxçivan. There were no Armenians ever living here - so how could there have been churches here?

There never was a church in Abrakunis, there never was a church in Shurut, there never was a church in Julfa!”

To download Sim’s report on the outrageous destruction of the Armenian heritage in Nakhichevan, visit http://nakhichevan.cjb.net/.

Note: Above are excerpts from the article. The full article appears here. Clarifications and comments by me are contained in {}. Deletions are marked by [...]. The bold emphasis is mine.