DM Monitoring
BAKU: The Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Azerbaijan said in a statement that during the 30 years of Armenia’s military aggression against Azerbaijan and the occupation of our lands, its appeals to UNESCO to investigate war crimes such as destruction, misappropriation of Azerbaijani cultural heritage, change of its essence, as well as illegal transportation of cultural values from Azerbaijani land have been ignored and the UNESCO Secretariat has not shown determination in this regard.
“The Ministry of Culture of Azerbaijan has launched preliminary monitoring of cultural heritage in the liberated Azerbaijani lands, and the results of the initial monitoring have been officially submitted to UNESCO. The monitoring report also included photos of the destruction of all our religious and cultural monuments as well as the desecration of our mosques in the territories once occupied by Armenia. We hope that UNESCO will not remain silent about the war crimes reflected in the monitoring report,” said the statement.
Azerbaijani Minister of Culture Anar Karimov said at a meeting with UN Resident Coordinator in the country, Resident Representative of the United Nations Development Program (UNDP) Gulam Isagzai that Azerbaijan has many times appealed to UNESCO in connection with a mission to monitor the state of cultural heritage sites in the territories of the country that had been under Armenian occupation for the past 30 years. According to the minister, unfortunately, the appeals remained non-responded, and UNESCO never addressed Armenia to provide an opportunity to carry out the mission.
He noted that UNESCO’s statements about sending its mission to the territories liberated from the Armenian occupation caused bewilderment of the Azerbaijani side.
“We brought to the organization’s attention that in order to carry out the mission in the liberated territories, it’s first important to resolve security issues, especially, to de-mine the territories, and also take into account the unfavorable weather conditions,” added Karimov.
