The most famous erasure was in Julfa, not mentioned in that article. In the late 1990s and early 2000s, the Azerbaijani army destroyed an entire cemetery of abo

The most famous erasure was in Julfa, not mentioned in that article. In the late 1990s and early 2000s, the Azerbaijani army destroyed an entire cemetery of about 10,000 17th-century Armenian "khachkars," finely decorated tombstones that were a common medieval Armenian art form. These had been documented by French and Scottish explorers hundreds of years ago. When confronted by the UN, Azerbaijan's government denied the claims and suggested that an unknown actor destroyed them. This maybe could've been believable from the outside, but then their govt not only asserted that the tombstones weren't Armenian but also that no Armenians had ever existed in Julfa. They claimed that any monuments there were Caucasian Albanian. The tombstones do have inscriptions written in the distinctive Armenian alphabet, and both Armenian and Albanian histories in that region are well-documented. These aren't isolated incidents but go well in line with what high-ranking Azerbaijani government officials have been saying: there is no history of Armenian residence in disputed territory, or even in Armenia proper (e.g. Pres Aliyev claimed this in 2020 about Armenia's capital Yerevan). The common claim is that the Armenian identity was made up recently, and their alphabet or anything else often dating back ~1600 years is actually Albanian. Baku's recent ex-mayor, and the deputy PM of the nation in 2018, said to a German delegation in 2005, "Our goal is the complete elimination of Armenians. You, Nazis, already eliminated the Jews in the 1930s and 40s, right? You should be able to understand us."