END GENOCIDE TOURISM IN ARTSAKH
Less than three years after the entire population of indigenous Armenians was violently forced from their ancestral homelands of Artsakh (Nagorno-Karabakh), the perpetrators and current occupiers have begun using Western booking platforms - Booking.com, AirBnB, GetYourGuide, Viator, TripAdvisor, Expedia, AAA - to sell tours through the desecated lands.
Baku Heritage Tours, with a sibling trading as Smile Azerbaijan Tour, are marketing 14-hour tours through sites of significant Armenian heritage, Stepanakert and Shushi, to propagate state propaganda that promotes fabricated historical narratives laying claim to these lands, while their true history is destroyed and reappropriated with language like:
Instead of:
The transformation of the Stepanakert University founded in 1969, including the erasure of writings, deliberate destruction of the rich library, and infrastructure, represents the next stage of Azerbaijan's systematic policy aimed at eradicating the Armenian heritage. Such actions flagrantly violate Article 4 of the 1954 Hague Convention for the Protection of Cultural Property in Time of Armed Conflict and Article 15(a) of the Second Protocol of 1999.
Instead of:
The monument, crafted from red tuff specially brought from Armenia, was sculpted by Sargis Baghdasaryan, with Yuri Hakobyan as the architect. Baghdasaryan described his work as follows: "The monument represents elderly Artsakh spouses in traditional costume, standing shoulder to shoulder with a proud and unyielding attitude and a serious gaze. The monument lacks a pedestal, but it appears as though the mountain itself has split open, allowing them to rise from within and stand firmly planted in the Armenian soil." Notably, the elderly couple depicted in the monument were modeled after the sculptor's grandparents, who were born in Artsakh. "They are the people, they are the land, they are us—our mountains. These people were born here, their thousand-year-old roots are here, and they are the true owners of this land and nature," Baghdasaryan wrote.
DO NOT ALLOW BOOKING ENGINES TO NORMALIZE STATE-SPONSORED ERASURE FOR PROFIT.
DEMAND:
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The end to promoting tourist trips to "Khankendi" - ethnically cleansed Artsakh.
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Recognition of the history and displacement of Artsakh’s Armenian population.
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Review their human-rights, ESG, and ethical tourism policies.
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Removal of tourism promotions that normalize or profit from the aftermath of forced displacement.
TAKE ACTION
Send a message to Booking platforms and demand that they stop tourism-washing Artsakh and stop participating in the erasure of its Armenian history.
Letter Campaign by
