YEREVAN (Azatutyun) — One week after Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan pledged to continue trying to depose him, Catholicos Karekin II accused Azerbaijan on Thursday, September 4, of destroying Armenian churches in Nagorno-Karabakh and decried the “illegal” captivity of the region’s former leaders.
The supreme head of the Armenian Apostolic Church again slammed Baku as he hosted an international inter-church conference on the 1,700th anniversary of the First Council of Nicaea that had brought together Christian bishops.
Addressing participants of the four-day conference representing major Christian denominations, Karekin said it is taking place in “a country that has suffered untold persecution, hardship, and trials for the sake of Christ.”
“Today, our people are also going through trials,” he said, pointing to the 2020 Armenian-Azerbaijani war and the 2023 “forcible displacement” of Karabakh’s ethnic Armenian population that followed an Azerbaijani offensive.
“Azerbaijan continues to illegally hold Artsakh state officials and prisoners of war to this day. In occupied Artsakh, our centuries-old spiritual and cultural heritage, historical holy sites, are currently being destroyed and damaged and also appropriated under the false pretext of being non-Armenian,” added the Catholicos.
Karekin had already denounced the “sham trials” of the former Karabakh leaders and accused Azerbaijan of committing ethnic cleansing in Karabakh and illegally occupying Armenian border areas during a conference hosted by the World Council of Churches (WCC) in Switzerland in May. Azerbaijan’s top Shia Muslim cleric closely linked to the government in Baku protested against “the provocative, revanchist propaganda of the Armenian Church” in a letter to the WCC.
