Considering unfolding events in Karabakh, Italian Prime Minister Carlo Azeglio Ciampi was clear. He saw Armenia committing war crimes. [I] It was 1993, at the outset of a devastating, sustained assault, that would see the town of Aghdam emerge, years later, to be known as the ‘Hiroshima of the Caucasus’. Armenian forces were sweeping across the territory.

We have all heard of the atrocities committed in Gushchular and Malibeyli, certainly in Khojaly — but Aghdam was every inch as heinous. And these were not isolated incidents; similar horrors unfolded across dozens of other Azerbaijani towns and villages. The Armenian blitzkrieg across Karabakh would claim the lives of thousands of civilians, with tens of thousands injured and maimed.[II] Three decades on, hundreds of Azerbaijani civilians remain unaccounted for.

What attracted the ire of the Italian head of state in July 1993 was events unfolding in Aghdam, a town on the eastern foot of the Lesser Caucasus Mountains, some 30 kilometres from Khankendi. It was a place of outstanding natural beauty, its craftsmen and women famed for their skills in producing fine silks. Its weavers produced carpets that were among the most prized across the Soviet Union. The town’s artisan brewing industry produced port wines and brandies so refined that Leonid Brezhnev, General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, was reputed to be an aficionado. Along with a fine reputation for textiles and beverages, Aghdam was a centre for education and a cradle of South Caucasus culture.

For so long a place of quiet prosperity, the city had already seen its share of nightmares as Karabakh fell under brutal occupation. In February 1992, it was there that many of the bedraggled survivors of the Khojaly Massacre had stumbled, traumatised, many injured, most having lost their homes and everything they knew. Aghdam’s people had rallied around, offering their homes to those who arrived with nothing.

There were emotional scenes at the historic Aghdam Mosque. As local Azeri Defence Forces managed to reclaim some of the bodies of those shot and hacked to death, it was to that mosque that they brought brutalised and maimed corpses to be reclaimed by their agonised families.

A year and a half on from Khojaly — and after the occupation of several other districts — it would be Aghdam’s turn to face the wrath of the aggressors. According to Human Rights Watch, ‘during their offensive against Aghdam, Armenian forces committed hostage taking, indiscriminate fire, and the forcible displacement of civilians’. [III] It was close to the city that French photojournalist Reza Deghati became introduced to the infamous Spoon Game, profiled earlier in this tome, a ‘sport’ where Armenian soldiers compete to see who could gouge the most eyes of captured Azerbaijanis.

Armenia overran the strategic town in July 1993. At that point, New York-based Human Rights Watch recorded: ‘…after the city was seized, it was intentionally looted and burned under orders of Armenian authorities.’ [IV]

The NGO considered these actions to violate the rules of war. Neither was Human Rights Watch the only international organisation taking notice of these atrocities. By now, officials at the Conference on Security and Co-operation in Europe (CSCE) were beginning to hear of the butchery. An element of the détente process during the Cold War, CSCE would ultimately morph into the Organisation for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE).

Aghdam, like so many other towns and villages across Karabakh and swathes of other Azerbaijani territory, ultimately fell during the barbarity of these war crimes. Like in Gushchular, in Malibeyli, and in Khojaly, despite widespread international revulsion, the perpetrators of these atrocities enjoyed decades of impunity. Some were even elevated to the highest political positions in Armenia. It was not until Azerbaijan’s 2023 anti-terror operation in Khankendi — which brought an end to the last illegal Armenian military presence — that several of these figures, including former leaders of the puppet regime, were finally apprehended and brought before Azerbaijani courts.

Some 28 years later, a Moscow-brokered ceasefire ended the Patriotic War. Azerbaijan regained the four districts it had liberated by force. At the same time, Armenia agreed to release the territory it still clung to in the districts of Aghdam, Kalbajar, and Lachin. The agreement achieved all of President Ilham Aliyev’s strategic aims.

Attention quickly turned to the revival of the region. However, even though Baku was prepared to encounter a scene of violent destruction, the sheer scale of what they discovered was beyond anything considered possible. Students of history will know of the term scorched earth. The term had been part of military campaigns from Union Major General William Tecumseh Sherman’s March to the Sea during the American Civil War to being employed by the Allies and Axis powers during World War II. Germany’s wholesale destruction of the countries conquered during its Balkans-Greece-Crete campaign will forever be among the most heinous examples. The most famed example, perhaps, is Japan’s World War II approach in China. Tokyo’s Three Alls policy, Sankō Sakusen, represented ‘kill all, burn all, loot all’.

A generation later, considering information reaching him from Aghdam, Prime Minister Ciampi identified the Three Alls in Armenian policy. Along with the insidious Spoon Game, it was a shameful episode written in blood. When it came to ‘kill all, burn all, loot all’, upon liberation, authorities were under no illusions that they would encounter a veritable twilight zone of destruction. Interviewing Vugar Suleymanov, Chairman of the Azerbaijan National Agency for Mine Action (ANAMA), one learns of the enormity of the task ahead. During its nearly three decades holding Karabakh, a territory allegedly having such a powerful emotional spell over Armenia’s leaders that they were prepared to do anything to control it, precious little socioeconomic development of any sort had occurred.

Most of the territory had been allowed to wither through underinvestment, aside from plundering of self-enriching economic sites, like the mines that produced precious metals and minerals.

Then, in 2020, they had stripped electric wiring and pipes, poured poisonous chemicals into civilian and agricultural water sources, blown up buildings, bridges, roads, dams and communications infrastructure, burned crops and salted the earth. For good measure, they embarked upon an insane effort to lay tens of thousands of more uncharted landmines, setting booby-traps wherever possible, targeting areas likely to see civilians return.

In December 2020, as per the ceasefire agreement, Aghdam was handed over to Azerbaijan. Yet it was, in effect, only partly returned. The impact of landmines extends beyond immediate casualties. They create a pervasive atmosphere of fear and hinder post-conflict recovery.

Land contaminated with mines is rendered unusable, preventing communities from engaging in agriculture, infrastructure development, or economic activity. When it came to Aghdam, if paradise was lost in 1992, it continued to be absent in 2020. Returning Aghdam to its former vibrancy and lustre is a project that will take years due to a hidden legacy of landmines.

In December 2017, this author visited Japan, taking the opportunity to see the iconic Genbaku Dome, often referred to as the Hiroshima Peace Memorial. It was the only structure left standing near the epicentre of the world’s first atomic bomb, which exploded over that city on August 6, 1945. Nearby, a visitor centre offers stark images of incinerated buildings, a haunting scar on history and a painful reminder of the devastating power of war.

It was December 2023, almost exactly six years to the day, we took a narrow, winding road into the heart of the old city of Aghdam. Although the occupying forces had been expelled for two years, the formerly bustling commercial hub remained a haunting tableau of desolation. Skeletal stone building remnants stood amidst a sea of rubble and long, overgrown weeds. What few buildings remained were carcasses. Echoes of a bygone age.

We arrived at the lonely façade of what was once the Aghdam State Drama Theatre, a seat of culture that attracted patrons from as far afield as Khankendi in its heyday. Today, only the building’s heavy stone archways remain, testimonials to the former grandeur of a place in time now desecrated and lost. Like the Genbaku Dome in Hiroshima, it stands as a relic of man-made devastation. Aghdam itself has come to be known as the ‘Hiroshima of the Caucasus’, and the cadaver of its drama theatre will be preserved — a permanent monument to the transgressions that befell Aghdam and Karabakh.

Elsewhere, one can find Aghdam’s Panah Ali Khan’s Palace, a mausoleum of Panah Ali Khan, founder of Karabakh Khanate. During the occupation, the site was desecrated. According to the United States Department of State, the adjacent Imarat Garvand cemetery, with its sacred 18^th-century tombs and Martyrs’ Alley, were among the religious sites violated, looted or destroyed. [XII] In Imarat Garvand cemetery, Western diplomats reported that there were empty holes where bodies had been interred for centuries.

International humanitarian law contains various provisions about armed conflicts and the treatment of the dead and their burial places.

The Department of State reported that just one damaged tombstone remained at the site.Anti-Muslim graffiti was scratched crudely into stonework, while religious buildings had been desecrated and used to stable cattle and pigs. [XIII] Inside the mosque’s qubba, a symbolic representation of the vault of heaven, one can still catch a whiff of the dung left behind by decades of beasts.

Since ancient times, even the most heinous of leaders and armies stopped at the water’s edge when it came to desecrating religion. The Armenian forces did not. Even in these contemporary times of fraying morality, many of the world’s despots are loathed to mess with faith-based targets. It has been a line that few crossed. In Karabakh, though, digging up ancient graves and keeping animals in places of worship became customary.

Alongside the more than 400 cultural and religious heritage monuments that were razed or vandalised, the University of Essex research paper Destruction of Islamic cultural and religious sites in Azerbaijan’s occupied territories and related anti-Muslim narrative noted: ‘Out of 67 mosques in Karabakh, 63 have been razed to ground, and the remaining have been severely damaged.’ [XIV] These figures are not final — assessments are still ongoing, and the number of documented violations continues to grow.

Because of this destruction, the region’s people encountered a different landscape as they returned. “We thought we would be back in a few days, a few weeks…. Not decades later,” offered Hafiz Azimzade, who ushered his family into their car and away to safety just minutes ahead of the arrival of the Armenian forces attack, which ultimately succeeded in overrunning the area. [XV] Azimzade lived much of his life waiting to return home. It may be somewhat discombobulating when he, his family, and his neighbours eventually have the opportunity to be part of The Great Return. The region will rise again. But an age of innocence, pre-occupation tranquillity, is gone.

The violent and non-violent repression of individual groups, or using cultural means to destroy a group, is identified as cultural genocide. That association with genocide illustrates serious international concern. Yet, cultural genocide has often been more a rhetorical tool rather than a crime that has actively been prevented or punished.

the parameters of the United Nations Genocide Convention, there is an assumption that genocide is the physical destruction of a group, leaving legal debates around whether a more anthropologic cultural genocide can fit within its remit. In the 21^st century, legal discussion continues about who may be considered a cultural group and the utility of identifying cultural genocide without its definitive criminalisation.

That academic and legal debate fades somewhat when measured against definitive examples. In the early 1990s, as ordinary people like Selimzadeh were forced to leave, terrified for their lives, they left behind everything — schools and hospitals, fields, crops and flocks, mosques large and small, ancient and contemporary.

In the shadow of artillery and with murderous soldiers sweeping across the territory, people hurriedly left behind the gravesites of their ancestors, monuments to their history and culture, ancient forts and the robust stone palaces of their Khans. Running for their lives, there had been little consideration of what was left behind.

Time and the opportunity to contemplate their loss changed that. While they existed in exile, occupying forces sought to purge millennia of history. It was undertaken with such enthusiasm that the essence of thousands of years was scrubbed from the landscape.

That is how cultural genocide looks. It was not just the attempted annihilation of Islam. Ancient Caucasian Albanian sites were systematically scratched from history, adapted to tell a counterfeit Armenian narrative. “It was the attempted destruction of our culture, religion and identity to wipe us from history,” rued Robert Mobili, today serving as Chairman of the Albanian-Udi community in Azerbaijan. [XVI]

For decades, Baku repeatedly called for international monitoring of vulnerable sites and for the Paris-based United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organisation to do its mandated job. However, the Paris-based body was disinclined to become involved, not least after former French culture minister Audrey Azoulay was elected its Director-General. Across almost three decades, there was an unencumbered, systematic effort to engender a complete effacement of Azerbaijani culture from the landscape of Karabakh.

Upon liberation, craftsmen spent several years restoring Imarat Garvand. Masons could be seen repairing or replacing the pockmarked stonework. Archaeologists catalogued the bodies that remained at the site, those not dug up, burned, or discarded. Hallowed religious buildings were cleaned and reconsecrated, again representing the holy ground they had for centuries. In defiance of those who sought to purge the site, today, it has regained its original form and structure. The rise of Imarat Garvand has become totemic for all of Karabakh.

Blocks of apartments are near completion, awaiting the arrival of IDP families, while an equestrian centre is ready for the arrival of its equine inhabitants. If the reconstitution of Imarat Garvand is a nod to the past, around it grows a testimonial to an even brighter future. President Aliyev announced that the city will receive its first returnees in 2025. [XVII]

As we paused to pay our respects at the theatre’s ruins and walked through the ransacked Imarat Garvand cemetery, a haunting silence enveloped the area. It was broken only by the occasional bird song and the faint echoes of construction. Yet, a new Aghdam is already taking shape on virgin land nearby, a testament to resilience and renewal.

However, the old town’s enduring silence speaks volumes about its tragic past. Along that narrow, stony road into Aghdam, remnants of the ruined pre-occupation town remained railed off. At regular intervals, prominent signs offered a sharp warning. In multiple languages, using graphics that leave nothing unsaid, these warn that we are travelling along a cleared strip of land winding through the heart of a vast, deadly minefield. Across those Armenian killing fields, some devices were so hastily laid that they are strewn, visible, poking out of the grass and weeds. Tens of thousands of anti-personnel mines, no bigger than a hockey puck but designed to kill or injure civilians and construction workers, mean that every patch of ground holds the potential for catastrophe, turning what should be simple movements into high-stakes decisions.

These represent a cynical effort to deny communities the opportunity to rebuild long after the end of the conflict. It is a cowardly thing to leave the war behind you in the shape of minefields that endanger women, children and the most vulnerable. One July 2023 article in Israel Hayom was typical, reporting of a beekeeper in Kalbajar attending his hives, badly injured by a mine. [XVIII] In reality, there will be many more victims over the ensuing years.

The landmine situation in Aghdam is serious. This is compounded by Armenian procrastination in providing maps, which they are mandated to do under international law. And under the terms of ceasefire agreements. This purposeful lack of transparency will inevitably cost lives. A June 2021 arrangement saw Azerbaijan release 15 prisoners of war in return for blueprints that marked where 97,000 landmines are stashed in and around Aghdam. President Aliyev noted that those maps, grudgingly provided, are still only 25 per cent accurate. [XIX]

And it is not just Aghdam. Many parts of Karabakh are minefields. The Demilitarised Zone, a strip of land across the Korean Peninsula near the 38th parallel north, divides the two Koreas. It is considered the most militarised place on earth. According to CBS, an estimated two million mines are inside and near the zone. Spread far more randomly and more indiscriminately, Karabakh is burdened by 1.5 million landmines, a treacherous labyrinth of unexploded ordinance, live artillery shells and other deadly by-products of occupation.

Italian Prime Minister Carlo Azeglio Ciampi left the premiership in May 1994, going on to serve as President of his nation between 1999 and 2006. He died in Rome in September 2016, and his statesmanship was recognised through a national day of mourning and flags flown at half-mast. Yet he was not a political heavyweight in Italy. Nor did he have a voice that resonated across Europe.

Therefore, his call for justice in Karabakh and his willingness to call out Armenia for its war crimes did not lead to international consensus over the carnage. Indeed, decades from Ciampi’s sharp statement, the evil inheritance of landmines continues to eat away at Azerbaijan — and the very fabric of our shared humanity — like a cancer. They are an extension of the genocide.

Back in Aghdam, the State Drama Theatre’s arches bear witness to the steep price of war. And the legacy of an uneasy half-peace. The city is surrounded by minefields, those known to ANAMA and those still hidden through Yerevan’s intransigence. President Aliyev had promised that his administration would build a “paradise”. [XX]

Across Karabakh, ANAMA has cleared tracts of mines for the roads that now bring in the building materials, machinery and workforce to deliver on that commitment.

Meeting the likes of Huseynov, Anar Guliyev, Chairman of the State Committee of Urban Planning and Architecture, and Elbay Gasimzade, Chairman of the Union of Architects of Azerbaijan, one hears not just of urban planning.

There is a determination to see Aghdam not just rebound but become an iconic city primed for the 21^st century. Today, it continues to bear some of the scars of occupation. Fences stretch for blocks, enclosing landmines and the rubble of a ruined old city. Deserted remnants of buildings await demolition.

The sounds of jackhammers, bulldozers and the endless beeping of construction vehicles precede the everyday noises of a typical city. As construction projects are completed, the scenes of desolation that invite a tagline as a Hiroshima of the Caucasus will begin to recede. Already, there are flashes of the bright future ahead. Aghdam is a city in transition. It is clear that, while Azerbaijan is dealing with a difficult past, the nation will not be defined by it.