World Tour: Special Report on Armenia

NICK EICHER, HOST: Next up on The World and Everything in It: Remembering the Armenian genocide.

The month of April is Armenian Heritage Month. Armenian communities in this country are hosting events to honor the memory of those killed in the Armenian Genocide that began in 1915.

Last week on Capitol Hill, Armenian Americans met with lawmakers to mark the tragedy.. They’re also pressing for sanctions on the government of Azerbaijan—complaining about its aggressive tactics in 2023 over a disputed territory known internationally as Nagorno-Karabakh. They don’t even agree on the name—with Armenians calling it Artsakh.

LINDSAY MAST, HOST: With peace talks nearing a conclusion, tensions remain high between Azerbaijan and Armenians. To help explain the more than century-old dispute, WORLD’s Jenny Lind Schmitt has a WORLD Tour special report.

AUDIO: Armenian and Azerbaijani officials said Thursday they had agreed to a peace agreement to end the nearly four decades of conflict between the two nations…

JENNY LIND SCHMITT: In mid-March, Armenia and Azerbaijan announced they had finalized a peace treaty to bring their 35-year hostilities to an end.

AUDIO: At the moment, the existing content of the agreement can be considered a compromise option that may be acceptable in our current circumstances. It is acceptable for the republic of Armenia.

That’s Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan on March 13th. But before the document could be signed, Azerbaijan announced further conditions for peace.

Azerbaijan wants Armenia to amend its constitution to remove all references to unity with Nagorno-Karabakh. That’s the region that Azerbaijan recaptured in late 2023. Azerbaijan promised amnesty and peace to the ethnic Armenians living in Nagorno-Karabakh when it invaded the region.

Jacob Pursley is pastor of the International Bible Church of Armenia in Yerevan.

JACOB PURSLEY: But as people were exiting and leaving the country,

The entire Armenian population of 120-thousand fled to mainland Armenia.

PURSLEY: … they kept back at least 23 people that they took, as I call them, hostages.

Azerbaijani forces arrested the leaders of the autonomous region, accusing them of terrorism.

PURSLEY: So the president of Artsakh, Ruben Vardanyan…Ruben Vardanyan,... you have all of these different people that are now, uh, facing these mock trials, uh, being accused of 2548 crimes.

But with the territory firmly in Azerbaijan’s control, what’s the point of the trial?

Stepan Sargsyan is former governor of the Lachin region.

STEPAN SARGSYAN: First, it can be used as a leverage in the ongoing negotiations over a peace treaty with the Armenian government. Second, it is a show trial for its domestic audience for the president of Azerbaijan.

Sargsyan says Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev has used the ongoing conflict with Armenia to distract his own citizens from corruption in his decades long dictatorship. Both he and Pursley fear Azerbaijan’s aggression towards Armenia may not be over.

PURSLEY: When you listen to their normal news cycles, you watch their documentaries, They say, that's our land. We want it back and we're going to get it back. It's just a matter of ten years from now, 15 years from now, when that will be. But that's the next step.

Meanwhile, Azerbaijan is working to systematically erase evidence that Armenians–and Christianity–have been in the region for 17 hundred years.

Caucasus Heritage Watch—or CHW—has used satellite technology since 2001 to monitor Armenian cultural sites in territories now held by Azerbaijan. It found that between 1997 and 2009, at least 108 of 159 historic churches, monasteries, and cemeteries were destroyed in the enclave of Nakhchivan.

Now CHW is seeing the same thing in Nagorno-Karabakh. Co-founder Lori Khatchadourian presented recent findings in February. Audio courtesy of The Promise Armenian Institute at UCLA.

AUDIO: CHW has thus far documented 14 destroyed sites, including 2 churches and 4 cemeteries. For example the 19th century St. Hovhannes Church in Shusa-Sushi was flattened between December 2023 and April 2024….We have documented 14 damaged sites, including 3 churches and 5 historic cemeteries.

In some cases, there is now an empty field where a church once stood. In others, new mosques have been built on the sites.

To protect their ancient heritage, many ethnic Armenians from Nagorno-Karabakh want to return to their homes, even if that means living under Azerbaijan’s rule.

On March 18, the senate of Switzerland passed a bill proposing a peace forum to help the treaty talks between the two countries. It also called for the right of the people to return to their homes in safety. The bill’s co-sponsor is Stefan Müller-Altermatt:

AUDIO: There is no voice for the people of Nagorno-Karabakh. They’re a third party. We want to give this third party–the people of Nagorno-Karabakh– a voice. That’s also why we wanted to have this peace forum.

Müller-Altermatt says the international community needs to put pressure on Azerbaijan because time is running out for people to return home.

Sargsyan says that while the conflict between the two countries has never been about religion, Azerbaijani President Aliyev is using religion to foment anti-Armenian sentiment.

SARGSYAN: In fact, Azerbaijan is intentionally trying to turn this into an interfaith conflict to gain the support of the wider Islamic world. Yet it's not. Armenia has great relationships with most, if not all Muslim Arab states. Like I said, Iran as well.

Because of those good relationships and its location, Armenia is strategic for the gospel. Particularly since the country has an open border with Iran.

PURSLEY: Armenia is the country here that offers a safe place for Iranians to come look. So they come to Armenia because they want to learn about Christianity.

Stepan Sargsyan prays it will stay that way for generations to come.

SARGSYAN: We have struggled for millennia as a Christian people to stay on this land, sticking to our faith. So we would like this message to resonate with all our Christian brothers in Europe and the United States, to help make sure that Christian churches and monasteries are not destroyed, just like they are being destroyed currently in Nagorno-Karabakh.

Reporting for WORLD, I’m Jenny Lind Schmitt.

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