On September 19, 2024, Prof. Adam T. Smith (Distinguished Professor of Arts and Sciences in Anthropology, Director of CIAMS, and Co-director of Caucasus Heritage Watch) presented testimony to the Tom Lantos Human Rights Commission of the United States Congress. Smith’s testimony was part of a hearing on alleged human rights violations perpetrated by the government of Azerbaijan against the Armenian community expelled from Nagorno-Karabakh in September 2023. The hearing examined evidence for ethnic cleansing and related human rights abuses, including the treatment of prisoners of war and political prisoners, and the status of Armenian cultural sites in Nagorno-Karabakh.
After the government of Azerbaijan launched a military campaign to gain control over Nagorno-Karabakh in September 2023, most of the region’s indigenous ethnic Armenians fled, having suffered years of violence and a crippling blockade by Azerbaijani forces since the outbreak of the Second Nagorno-Karabakh War in 2020.
The Tom Lantos Commission on Human Rights is co-chaired by Chris Smith (R) from New Jersey and James P. McGovern (D) of Massachusetts. The witnesses who presented in the hearing presented testimony on the considerable evidence for ethnic cleansing, the abuse of detainees, violations of war crimes statues, and the intentional destruction of Armenian cultural heritage sites.
Prof. Smith provided testimony using data gathered by Caucasus Heritage Watch (CHW), a research program based at Cornell and Purdue Universities. Co-founded in 2020 with Prof. Lori Khatchadourian (Associate Professor of Near Eastern Studies and Anthropology), CHW monitors “endangered and damaged cultural heritage using high-resolution satellite imagery” in order to alert the global community to abuses that not only threaten irreplaceable historic monuments but also violate the basic human right to cultural practice and memory.
Smith stated, “at issue…is not only the fate of the region’s centuries old art and architecture but the cultural traditions of the Armenians of Nagorno-Karabakh and their connections to this land.” He discussed the evidence of wide-scale eradication of Armenian cultural sites in Azerbaijan, citing CHW’s exhaustive investigation “Silent Erasure”. That study of Armenian cultural sites in Azerbaijan’s Nakhchivan region documented the elimination of 108 of 110 (98%) historic Armenian monasteries, churches, and cemeteries between 1997 and 2010. Smith’s testimony went on to assess the current state of Armenian heritage sites in Nagorno-Karabakh since the 2020 war and the expulsion of Armenian in 2023. CHW’s assessments have documented the destruction of fourteen heritage sites, including historic cemeteries and churches. Twelve additional sites have sustained “significant damage.” An additional 31 sites are immediately threatened due to road construction, infrastructure works, and other building programs that have demolished Armenian heritage sites as a “collateral benefit” of large-scale economic development. As Smith noted, the effort to protect cultural monuments is not simply an effort to preserve buildings: “we also want to make clear that our project is an assertion of the inalienable human right to culture. Attacks on heritage monuments are not just violence against buildings, they are violence against a people and against their collective identity.”
Prof. Smith concluded his testimony with a statement on what needs to be done, in addition to the monitoring done by Caucasus Heritage Watch: “The real need is amplification…the world community needs to be aware of heritage destruction and there needs to be a reputational cost for anyone, whether it's Azerbaijan, or Russia, or any state that undertakes to revise the historical record through the obliteration of archaeological and historical monuments.”
In addition to Prof. Smith, the panel consisted of Gegham Stepanyan, (Human Rights Defender, Republic of Artsakh), Kate Watters, (Co-founder and Executive Director, Crude Accountability), Sharmagh Mardi, (Supervising Lawyer, Center for Truth & Justice ), Van Krikorian, (Co-Chair, Armenian Assembly of America), and Andrea J. Prasow, (Executive Director, Freedom Now).
A full video recording of the hearing can be found on YouTube.
