Baku Hosts Junket for 40 Companies to Showcase Occupied Artsakh as Prime Tourist Destination

Azerbaijan Promotes Tourism and ‘Culture’ While Eradicating All Trace of Armenian Indigenous Life

Azerbaijani travel agents, agency representatives, and State Services personnel, once again, descended upon occupied Stepanakert and Shushi, on December 6 and 7, in what the the country’s State Tourism Bureau is calling a “familiarization trip” for representatives of 40 Azerbaijani tourism companies.

In their continuing efforts to whitewash war crimes, including ethnic cleansing, cultural genocide, and the forced expulsion of Artaskh’s indigenous Armenian population, the genocidal Azerbaijani state structures have been sponsoring a variety of “all-expense-paid” trips for foreign and domestic companies, corporations, and groups, as well as individuals, from a variety of sectors.

However, the tourism sector has been given focused attention by Azerbaijani propagandists and Special Services, particularly the promotion of travel and tourism to occupied Artsakh where Azerbaijan’s ongoing destruction of Armenian religious and cultural sites continues unabated.

This latest petro-dollar funded junket was initiated and organized by the Azerbaijan Tourism Bureau, in conjunction with the Khankendi (Stepanakert) Hotel Complex, the Association of Tourism Agencies of Azerbaijan, Azerbaijan Railways, and the Shusha (Shushi) State Reserve, reported the Azerbaijani state-run caliber.az.

 

According to the same source, the Azerbaijan State Tourism Agency is framing the junket as a “familiarization trip” organized and sponsored to purportedly “showcase the tourism potential and existing infrastructure of the liberated [occupied Artsakh] territories.”

Participants in the junket travelled to the Karabakh (Artsakh) region via a newly inaugurated “Baku–Aghdam–Baku” passenger train route, construction of which was expedited after the violent take-over and occupation of the Artsakh Republic by Azerbaijan.

Concurrently, with the tourism sector junket, the so-called Karabakh (Artsakh) Regional Tourism Department of the Azerbaijani State Tourism Agency, simultaneously sponsored an extended “information tour,” from December 6 to 8, for tourism company representatives and industry bloggers covering Shushi, Stepanakert, Lachin, and Zangelan.

During these “tours,” Azerbaijani tourism industry representatives were given briefings on “tourism possibilities” utilizing existing hotel complexes and tourism support infrastructure in occupied Stepanakert and Shushi, as well as, briefings on what the Azerbaijani press reports as, “the natural and cultural heritage of the cities.”

Sadly, the “natural and cultural heritage[s] of the cities” have been the hard targets of Azerbaijani state sponsored soft and hard power cultural genocide campaigns. Currently, hundreds of monuments, churches, and sacred sites have been, and are being, physically destroyed by Azerbaijani forces attempting to erase all trace of Armenian indigenous life.

These indigenous Armenian religious and historic sites, some whose existence span millennia, include Armenian churches, monasteries, cross-stones, and a slew of other artworks and monuments.

In a tragic and ironic turn of events, Azerbaijan was recently made a key member of United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization—UNESCO—despite that terrorist state’s horrific record of direct complicity and initiation of war crimes and the destruction of world heritage sites, as well as tangible and intangible culture.

Azerbaijan is responsible for, among other atrocities of global magnitude, the complete erasure of all indigenous Armenian millennial culture in the historic Armenian territory of Nakhichevan.

Azerbaijani armed forces and special units were utilized by Azerbaijan to conduct the systematic destruction of the world’s largest intricately carved, Armenian cross-stone site—the Julfa (Jugha) Cemetery and adjacent monastery–in Nakhichevan from 1997 to 2006. This tragedy has been deemed globally as an unparalleled crime against humanity and prompted The Guardian to call it “the worst cultural genocide of the 21st century.”

It is worthy to note that The Julfa Cemetery, with its 10,000 plus intricately carved cross-stones and sacred structures had been designated a protected World Heritage site by UNESCO.