Condemnable Actions Unfit for One's Title: Patriarch's Visit to Azerbaijan is Unacceptable

The Gardman-Shirvan-Nakhichevan Pan-Armenian Union has issued a statement addressing the visit of Patriarch Kirill of Moscow and All Russia to Baku. The statement, in particular, notes that “It has become known that the Patriarch of Moscow and All Russia, Kirill, visited Baku and met with the President of Azerbaijan and his wife. First and foremost, the Patriarch's visit to a country whose history is fundamentally based on religious and ethnic discrimination is condemnable, systematically targeting the Christian population.

One of the foundations of Azerbaijani nationalism has always remained religious discrimination, which has manifested and continues to manifest in open or covert oppression of Christian minorities and the periodic destruction of Christian heritage. By visiting Baku, the Patriarch of Moscow and All Russia should have raised his voice against the state policy of open intolerance towards Christian values.

The Patriarch served a liturgy at the Holy Myrrh-Bearing Women Cathedral in Baku, but did he consider that liturgies are no longer being held in the Christian churches of Nagorno-Karabakh due to the forced displacement of the Christian population and the policy of ethnocide against Armenian spiritual values and culture?

Does the head of the Russian Orthodox Church not see it as his duty to ensure the preservation of the spiritual values and the guaranteed possibility of exercising religious rights of Christians in the region?

Another concerning step was the awarding of Mehriban Aliyeva with the Order of Saint Equal to the Apostles Olga of the Russian Orthodox Church, which further confirms the Patriarch's inadequate and biased stance on regional developments. In fact, Patriarch Kirill has awarded the Order of the canonized Olga to a person who actually sponsors the destruction of Russian heritage in Azerbaijan.

It is no secret that in Baku, alongside Armenian graves, Russian cemeteries and symbols dedicated to the Great Patriotic War are also targeted and desecrated. The President of Azerbaijan and his wife embody the systematic nature of the state's campaign of ethnic hatred against Armenians and the annihilation of Armenian identity, with their support equating to complicity, and the 'awarding' of such actions demonstrates a disrespectful attitude towards Christian values and culpable indifference towards brotherly nations.

The family of the Azerbaijani president is a direct heir to the regimes that perpetrated genocide in historical Gardman, Shirvan, and Nakhichevan, not only subjecting the local native ethnic Armenian population to periodic ethnic cleansing and forced displacements but also continuously destroying Armenian national-spiritual cultural heritage, which is nothing but a deliberate and targeted erasure of historical memory and arbitrary distortion of past realities.

The Gardman-Shirvan-Nakhichevan Pan-Armenian Union strongly condemns the actions of the Patriarch of Moscow and All Russia as unfit for his title. We call upon him, first and foremost, to demonstrate deep moral respect for the universal Christian values based on the principle of human-centeredness and, from this perspective, to voice the issue of restoring the rights of the hundreds of thousands of Christians who have been violently uprooted from their own millennia-old Christian environment. We urge Patriarch Kirill to be vigilant regarding the undeniable facts of Azerbaijan’s destruction of Armenian Christian heritage and, instead of awards, to take practical steps to prevent the crimes that are being committed and to call for accountability and punishment for them.