3/21/2025 Armenia (International Christian Concern) — Azerbaijan has systematically destroyed the ancient Christian heritage of the historic Armenian lands of Artsakh (Nagorno-Karabakh) and Nakhchivan.
Despite the plethora of international policies applicable to the conflict in the South Caucasus, no major institution intervened decisively to execute its purported mandate — most notably the United Nations (U.N.), the European Union (E.U.), the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), and the International Criminal Court (The Hague).
Months after Azerbaijan violently displaced more than 100,000 Armenians from their ancestral homeland in Artsakh, the U.N. quietly held its climate change convention (COP 29) in Azerbaijan in November 2024 with delegates from almost 200 states in attendance. Absent was the will to enforce international criminal law or to confront the impudence with which the president of Azerbaijan, Ilham Aliyev, had previously declared Artsakh as a “green energy zone.” Yet, the pleas of the oppressed Armenians had found no ears to hear.
In August 2024, International Christian Concern (ICC) formally requested that the U.S. government sanction Azerbaijani under the Magnitsky Act. This came after the United States Commission for International Religious Freedom (USCIRF) recommended designating Azerbaijan as a “Country of Particular Concern” (CPC) in its 2024 Annual Report — an action reserved for the most serious violators of religious freedom. However, the U.S. Department of State has not made any official designations since then. Likewise, the U.S. Congress has taken no action on a bill introduced in April 2024 investigating Azerbaijani officials according to the Global Magnitsky Human Rights Accountability Act.
ICC published an in-depth article on Nakhchivan in June 2024 and an analytical report on Artsakh in May 2024 outlining the past and present conflict in both regions, a conflict that represents another chapter in the centuries-old story of enmity between Islam and Christendom. Various other non-government organizations (NGO) of renown have also documented and denounced the Azerbaijani persecution and dispossession of Armenians, which has recently come to light. All these came to avail.
In April 2024, the Lemkin Institute for Genocide Prevention — a U.S.-based NGO associated with the drafting of the Genocide Convention by the U.N. General Assembly in 1948 — called the ongoing Azerbaijani destruction of Armenian churches and other ancient monuments in Artsakh a “cultural genocide” intending “to erase the historical presence” of Armenian heritage in the region.
In May 2023, the Caucasus Heritage Watch (CHW) — an investigative institution supported by Cornell University — published the results of a comprehensive investigation into Azerbaijan’s “silent erasure” of Armenia’s Christian heritage in Nakhchivan.
As it was when the siege of Artsakh began in December 2022, it has been since the eventual conquest of Artsakh occurred in September 2023: the international community has refused to act.
And its failure to deliver exposes the futility of its decrees of world peace, universal human rights, and a pluralistic global society. For the persecuted church, the illusory promises of international institutions are vanity. So teaches us the experience of dispossessed Armenian Christians in Artsakh and Nakhchivan.
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