STATEMENT
By SheikhuIslam AllahShukur PashaZadeh
Chairman of Caucasus Muslims Board
The aggressive Armenian regime has been resorting to fresh military provocations and launching rockets from heavy artillery at our settlements located in Azerbaijan’s Nagorno-Karabakh, in our lands around it and at the state border with Armenia, as well as our civilians since July 2020. Armenia launched a missile attack on our ancient town Barda on 28 October following repeated shelling of dozens of Azerbaijani towns and settlements, including Ganja, Azerbaijan’s second most important city, which is located a very long distance from the fighting area, from 27 September to date. A total of 21 people, including young children, were killed and more than 70 people were injured in Barda. A total of more than 90 civilians have been killed and 392 wounded, and 2,406 private houses, 92 apartment buildings, and 423 civilian objects have been destroyed to date. Nobody can be indifferent to the deaths of the innocent children killed in Ganja and Barda. However, the world community has not yet expressed a unanimous and unequivocal reaction to this terror committed by Armenia at the state level.
Armenia has committed a lot of bloody crimes in its history to date. Armenians have committed all crimes prohibited by human law, such as genocide, invasion of foreign land, extremism, terrorism, and violence.
Failure to fulfill UN resolutions, separatism, attempts at establishing a self-styled state, disrupting negotiations toward a peaceful settlement to the conflict, and failure to honor agreements and commitments are some of the activities of the incumbent Armenian regime and they lead Armenia’s statehood to a fiasco and collapse. The characteristics of Armenian extremists are genocide, xenophobia, Islamophobia, monoethnicity, conducting ethnic cleansing, establishing and financing terrorist organizations in order to ensure historical territorial claims, and using religion for their aggressive purposes.
The policy to destroy cultural heritage in our occupied lands, destroy cemeteries, insult mosques, destroy temples and religious monuments that belong to different religions and fake their history and change their origin, and misappropriate them by Gregorianizing them – all this is a manifestation of Armenian vandalism.
Another characteristic of the Armenian regime is the dissemination of fake, libelous and provocative information. An example of this is the fact that they are libeling Azerbaijan while using mercenary terrorists. They are saying that “Karabakh is Armenia” and even trying to change ancient placenames in the Azerbaijani lands they have occupied to misappropriate them. Another example is that they have committed acts of genocide in Khojaly, Ganja and Barda but are yelling around the world that they are allegedly subjected to genocide themselves. An indicator of Armenia’s political line in its most recent history is the justification of fascist-era criminals and perpetuation of their memory.
It is regrettable that the Armenian Church has blessed these aggressive and occupation crimes by Armenia. The Armenian Gregorian Church is giving its blessing to death, and not human life – the most sacred value, and it is absolutely illogical that it is justifying the deaths of children and women and the killings of civilians. The books of all heavenly religions, including the Bible and orations by the Prophet Jesus, call on people to live and let live. This behavior of Armenian Gregorian clergy, who fail to comply with the fundamental principles of Christianity and contradict the peace-loving calls of the Bible, is an insult to the religion to which they belong. The fact that instead of praying for peace those who are holding a cross in one hand and a weapon in the other in war trenches and inspiring their soldiers to occupy Azerbaijani lands raises doubts about whether they are really religious figures. The Armenian state and the Armenian Church, which are inciting their people not to peace but to violence and are urging their people to fight to death, are leading the future of the Armenian people to danger – a disaster.
I am calling on the leaders of countries around the world, international organizations and religious leaders to give a proper assessment to the essence and possible consequences of the appeal by the head of the Armenian Gregorian Church to Armenians of the world. If the religious center of Armenia, which is a monoethnic country, is promoting fascism, terrorism, occupation, annexation, and ethnic and religious enmity, it is a very dangerous trend and a threat to peace and the peaceful coexistence of religions and civilizations not only in the region but around the globe. Armenia realizes that it is helpless in the face of our country’s perseverance and persistence toward liberating its internationally recognized lands from occupation. It also realizes that its defeat is inevitable and is striving to use the church factor as a last resort in a bid to present the conflict as a religious one, as a Christian-Muslim confrontation, and, therefore, to secure the support of the Christian world. The fact that this factor is dangerous was repeatedly said in our meetings with the world’s leading religious leaders, including those which were brokered by the head of the Russian Orthodox Church, Patriarch Kirill; the Catholicos-Patriarch of All Georgia, Ilia II; and the World Council of Churches, and in which the Armenian religious leader participated, and it was unequivocally highlighted that the use of the factor of religion in conflicts is absolutely unacceptable because this factor contradicts the peaceful essence of religions.
We are declaring to the world once again that the current military confrontation is taking place in Azerbaijani territory. In our righteous cause we are not against any religion or nation, we have not committed aggression against any country, and Armenians living in Karabakh are our citizens. We believe that will win a victory under the leadership of our President, His Excellency Mr. Ilham Aliyev and owing to our victorious army, and that our soldiers have not died in vain. We want peace to be established and we hope that our intentions to achieve peace and tranquility in our Motherland, Azerbaijan, will receive support from the entire world community!
