G E N O C I D E
OF ARMENIANS 
AND  ARMENIAN CULTURE

About Cultural Genocide. What is it?

Cultural genocide is a term used to describe the deliberate destruction of the cultural heritage of a people or nation for political, military, religious, ideological, ethnical, or racial reasons.

Relevance to International Law

As early as 1933, Raphael Lemkin proposed a cultural component to genocide, which he called "vandalism".[1] However, the drafters of the 1948 Genocide Convention dropped that concept from their consideration.[2] The legal definition of genocide was confined to acts of physical or biological destruction with intent to destroy a racial, religious, ethnic or national group as such.[3]

Article 7 of the United Nations Draft Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (26 August 1994)[4] uses the phrase "cultural genocide" but does not define what it means. The complete article reads as follows:

Indigenous peoples have the collective and individual right not to be subjected to ethnocide and cultural genocide, including prevention of and redress for:

(a) Any action which has the aim or effect of depriving them of their integrity as distinct peoples, or of their cultural values or ethnic identities;
(b) Any action which has the aim or effect of dispossessing them of their lands, territories or resources;
(c) Any form of population transfer which has the aim or effect of violating or undermining any of their rights;
(d) Any form of assimilation or integration by other cultures or ways of life imposed on them by legislative, administrative or other measures;
(e) Any form of propaganda directed against them.

It should be noted that this declaration is only a draft. Were it to pass, it would be a "soft law" instrument and would not present binding legal obligations on UN parties.

Despite its lack of legal currency, the term has acquired rhetorical value as a phrase that is used to protest against the destruction of cultural heritage. It is also often misused as a catchphrase to condemn any destruction the user of the phrase disapproves of, without regard for the criterion of intent to destroy an affected group as such.

Examples of the Term's Usage

Cultural advocates have leveled charges of "cultural genocide" in connection with various events:

* As part of a wider effort to destroy the Polish culture, the Germans during the Second World War closed or destroyed universities, high schools, museums, libraries, and scientific laboratories, and demolished hundreds of monuments to national heroes as a form of cultural genocide. To prevent the birth of a new generation of educated Poles, German officials decreed that the schooling of Polish children should end with elementary education. In a May 1940 memorandum, Heinrich Himmler wrote: "The sole goal of this schooling is to teach them simple arithmetic, nothing above the number 500; writing one's name; and the doctrine that it is divine law to obey the Germans. I do not think that reading is desirable." These efforts well along with general massacres of Polish intelligentsia, such as at Piaśnica Wielka where 12,000 intelligentsia were killed.

* In 2007, a Canadian Member of Parliament criticized the Ministry of Indian Affairs' destruction of documents regarding the treatment of First Nations members as "cultural genocide."[5]

* The destruction by Azerbaijan of thousands of medieval Armenian gravestones at a cemetery-site in Julfa, and Azerbaijan's subsequent denial that the site had ever existed, has been widely written about as being an example of cultural genocide.[6][7]

* When Turkey's Minister of Cultural Affairs opened the Aghtamar church in eastern Anatolia as a museum, critics objected to the use of its Turkified name, seeing in it a denial of the region's Armenian heritage and as a sort of "cultural genocide".[8]

Acts of state-driven terrorism committed against Old Jugha remain unpunished

Today, December 15, 2010, marks the fifth anniversary of the destruction of the historic cross-stones located at the medieval Armenian cemetery of Old Jugha, which stands as an element of world cultural heritage. On 15 December 2005, the Azerbaijani government organized an operation carried out by their military which, conducted in broad daylight, finally completed the decades-long destruction of around 5,000 unique and irreplaceable cross-stones located at the cemetery of Old Jugha in Nakhichevan, which is a historic Armenian heartland.

This Taliban-style act was not an accidental crime of barbarity but, rather, a state-sponsored act of cultural terrorism, outright genocide and conscious vandalism. The final act of this inhuman campaign against the legacy of ancient Armenian civilization was directed by the clear objective of destroying all traces of Nakhichevan’s Armenian belonging.

On the 60th anniversary of the foundation of Azerbaijan’s Academy of Sciences on 14 December 2005, Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev issued a call for his country’s scholars and academic institutions to “prove” to the international community the “lack” of the Artsakh (Karabagh) Armenians’ historical rights to the territory of Mountainous Karabagh and to substantiate his thesis that “being guests and appearing in Karabagh only in the 1870s, the Armenians have no historical rights over the territory of Mountainous Karabagh.”

If, in the case of Artsakh, these “scholars,” who have become complicit in the large-scale propaganda projects generously subsidized by the Azerbaijani president, were compelled to accomplish their “task” by merely falsifying history in foreign languages—since the Artsakh Armenians had “cut the leg” of the genocidal Azerbaijani state—in the case of the Armenian cultural heritage preserved in Nakhichevan this legacy was a slap in the face to Aliyev’s false historiography and was making the millions of potential petrodollars null and void. Thus, the army of the aggressor state was mobilized to execute that despicable objective, resulting in the destruction of the centuries-old cross-stones, “killed” one by one, and a military facility was constructed in its place, on the very hallowed ground where the cemetery had once stood for centuries.

By this action, the Azerbaijani leadership has reconfirmed that the Azerbaijani state only continues to be a threat, not solely to the Armenians, but also a threat to world civilization, and that not only the Armenians, but their cemeteries and their history have become persona non grata for Azerbaijan.

Since 2007, and on numerous occasions since then, the Heritage party and its leader Raffi K. Hovannisian, along with Heritage party Members of Parliament Zaruhi Postanjyan, Larisa Alaverdyan and Stiopa Safaryan have consistently spoken out against this crime committed in Old Jugha before the parliamentary assemblies of the PACE, OSCE and NATO, and before other international platforms, and also to the Council of Europe’s Commissioner for Human Rights, insisting that a corresponding international fact-finding group must be sent to that region.

Jugha on GHN

Now you can find materials on  popular web site 


http://globalheritagefund.org/ (Global Heritage Network), 


which  represents  Cultural Genocide in Jugha

The Jugha cemetery was a unique collection of several thousand carved stone crosses (khachkars) on Azerbaijan’s southern border with Iran. But...


Between 10-16 December 2005 over a hundred uniformed men destroyed the Djulfa cemetery using sledgehammers, cranes, and trucks.


An armenian medieval  cemetery regarded as one of the wonders of the Caucasus has been 


erased from the Earth in an act of cultural vandalism likened to the Taleban blowing up the 


Bamiyan Buddhas in Afghanistan in 2001.

  Destruction of the statue by Taliban  
One of the two Buddahs of Bamiyan in 1976                                                                                                    After it was destroyed    




                                       

Armenian medieval khachkars. Jugha cemetry                                                                                                 December 2005. Destroying  of Armenian khachkars by azeri soldiers

  

Jugha's cross-stones and Buddha's statue don't exist anymore because of CULTURAL GENOCIDE

Cultural Genocide

Acts and measures undertaken to destroy any nations’ or ethnic groups’ culture is called, ‘cultural genocide’. The word ‘Genocide’ coined by Raphael Lemkin, does not only refer to the physical extermination of a national or religious group, but also its national, spiritual and cultural destruction. The concept of a cultural genocide has not yet been accepted into the 1948 UN Convention on the prevention and punishment of the crime of Genocide. 

Many proven facts concomitant with the massacres and deportation are witness to the fact that the Young Turk government premeditated and planed a systematic method aiming to destroy the material testimonies of the Armenian civilization. Realizing the role of the church and Christian faith within the Armenian nation, they knowingly massacred Armenian clergymen, destroyed churches, monasteries and other properties of church, alongwith thousands of medieval handwritten illuminated manuscripts. 

An Arab eye witnesses to the Armenian Genocide, Fayez el Husseyn, writes in his memoirs

Destruction of Armenian Monuments in Nakhichevan Cultural Genocide

The destruction of the Armenian monuments in Old Djulfa is cultural genocide, Armenian Deputy Foreign Minister Gegham Gharibjanian stated at news conference in Yerevan April 5, 2006 . Laying an emphasis on the difference between Iran, the representative of an ancient civilization, and Azerbaijan he remarked that Azerbaijan keeps on the destruction of the Armenian cultural monuments on its territory. "I want to mark the fact that the Iranian authorities treat the maintenance of the monuments belonging to other nations with great responsibility," he said, reported Novosti-Armenia.


Source:

JUGHA ERASED FROM THE FACE OF THE EARTH

Tuesday, October 17th, an international delegation comprised of representatives of different National Parliaments and a Scottish history-of-art specialist, were received by Mr.Kotchiro Matsuura, Director-General of UNESCO, from whom they will be solemnly requesting an international investigation and open denunciation of the crime perpetrated on the memorial site of Jugha (Djoulfa/Julfa) by the army of Azerbaijan.

• The delegation was formed at the behest of the Parliamentary Group Switzerland-Armenia – mainly the Co-Chairmen – the National Councillors Dominique de Buman (Vice-Chairman of the Christian Democratic-Party) and Ueli Leuenberger (Vice-Chairman of the Green Party) – with the support of Mr. Charles Aznavour, Ambassador of Armenia to UNESCO. The Parliamentarians will submit to the Director-General exhaustive documentation on the subject, as well as a signed Memorandum in which five recommendations will be presented to the state of Azerbaijan, among which, the construction of a Christian memorial on the site of the old cemetery. If Azerbaijan did not answer these recommendations, the delegation of the members of Parliament will ask the exclusion of Azerbaïdjan of UNESCO with arbitration of the European governments, Switzerland, Russia and Canada.
  
  
  
  Moreover, the organizers of this exceptional meeting, regretted not assistance of the Armenian government.
  /Jean Eckian – Paris, France/
  On January 23rd, 2006, French deputy François Rochebloine (UDF),recalled in his intervention at the Council of Europe:[…] «We have