By Paul Vartan Sookiasian
The Armenian Patriarchate of Jerusalem has strongly condemned the head of the Russian Orthodox Church for honoring Azerbaijani First Lady Mehriban Aliyeva during his visit to Baku on Saturday. The Armenian Patriarchate’s communique issued Tuesday described Patriarch Kirill’s bestowing of the Order of the Holy Princess Olga upon Aliyeva as “a grotesque display of ecclesiastical absurdity.”
Reports state that the award was granted for her “contributions to the preservation of traditional values in society and the promotion of intercultural and interfaith dialogue.” Aliyeva serves as not only First Lady to her husband President Ilham Aliyev, but also as his Vice-President. Aliyev welcomed Patriarch Kirill’s visit to Azerbaijan, during which he “emphasized that interfaith and interethnic peace and understanding prevail in Azerbaijan, with the Orthodox community playing a significant role in this harmony.”
Azerbaijan has long used tropes of interfaith harmony and ‘tolerance’ of minority groups as a cover for its ruthless treatment of the former Armenian population in Nagorno-Karabakh and continued repression of other minority groups, as well as civil society at large.
The Armenian Patriarchate describes the honor as “tarnishing the credibility of the Russian Orthodox Church,” since it is traditionally reserved for those who embody Christian virtues. It goes on to describe how Azerbaijan under the Aliyevs is seeking to obliterate Armenian Christian heritage across Nagorno-Karabakh, and has already destroyed cemeteries and churches such as Shushi’s Kanach Zham.
It condemns Kirill’s move to honor Aliyeva, calling it “a near-hostile, public estrangement from the Armenian Apostolic Church, and a tacit endorsement of Azerbaijan’s ongoing campaign of cultural genocide against Armenian Christianity.”
Aliyeva formerly served as a Goodwill Ambassador of UNESCO, which is tasked with protecting cultural heritage around the world, from 2004 until her unexpected resignation in 2022. During her tenure, the body’s Secretary-General, Irina Bokova, never spoke out about, condemned, or investigated Azerbaijan’s wholesale destruction of Armenian Christian sites, particularly the exquisite medieval Julfa cemetery in Nakhichevan. Bokova’s husband was implicated in taking payments from accounts linked to the $3 billion Azerbaijani Laundromat influence-buying slush fund.
This is the second time in the past month that the Patriarchate has condemned a major world church for honoring the Azerbaijani regime. It issued a similar condemnation of the Catholic Church in April for hosting a conference in Rome to spread a false narrative that Armenian churches in Nagorno-Karabakh actually belong to the medieval Caucasian Albanian people, which also contained at least one presentation arguing that Armenians are not even real Christians, given by Azerbaijani political scientist Fuad Akhundov.
Azerbaijan’s financial donations to the Vatican date back at least a decade, and the Pope similarly honored Aliyeva with its highest civilian honor, the Papal Order of Knighthood of Pope Pius IX, in 2020.
The Armenian Patriarchate’s response last month was similarly bold, declaring in all capital letters “we assert that this baseless conference’s glaring exclusion of Armenian scholars renders it a state-sponsored act of revisionism and pseudo-historiography that falls so humiliatingly below the standards of the Vatican that there is no plausible explanation except financial incentive.”
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