Genocide by Other Means: Heritage Destruction, National Narratives, and the Azeri Assault on the Indigenous Armenians of Karabakh

Abstract

The propaganda efforts of the authoritarian Aliyev regime in Baku and the general Western ignorance of the history of the South Caucasus have contributed to the lack of meaningful response to the genocidal aggression that Azerbaijan has inflicted on the indigenous Armenians of Artsakh, known to many as Nagorno-Karabakh. The humanitarian crisis created by the Azeri blockade of the Lachin Corridor is only the most recent step in a process of cleansing the region of its Armenian population, a process that began in the early years of the twentieth century. The Ottoman Turkish genocide of Armenians in 1915–1923 is not a distinct event of the past but a process whose ideology is central to the Azeri-Turkish genocidal violence perpetrated against Armenians in the present. An integral component of the processes of genocide is cultural heritage destruction as noted by Raphael Lemkin. The erasure of most signs of the indigenous Armenian presence on its historic homeland was particularly pronounced in the decades following the Armenian Genocide and continues today. Cultural erasure went hand in hand with Turkish state genocide denial and the rewriting and mythologizing of its national narrative. Azerbaijan has been following a similar playbook since the collapse of the Soviet Union. These genocidal processes of denial, heritage destruction, and the rewriting of history are what I describe as “genocide by other means.”