State Dept. Had No Comment About U.S. Envoy’s Visit to Occupied Shushi

U.S. Embassy, Ambassador to Azerbaijan Ignore Baku’s Systematic Destruction of Armenian Churches

The State Department refrained from commenting about a visit by U.S. Ambassador to Azerbaijan Mark Libby’s visit to occupied Artsakh and Shushi on Monday.

State Department spokesperson Matthew Miller was asked during Monday’s press briefing about Libby’s visit to Artsakh—the first ever visit by a U.S. diplomat since the 2020 War or since’s Azerbaijan’s deadly attack on Artsakh in September, which forced the mass exodus of its population.

“I don’t have any comment on that,” Miller told the daily press briefing. He also added that he had “no expectations” from the upcoming meeting of the foreign ministers of Armenia and Azerbaijan, scheduled for Friday in Kazakhstan’s capital of Almaty.

Miller and his wife, Danusia, visited occupied Artsakh on Monday and specifically toured Shushi, where Azerbaijan is actively destroying Armenian churches and other cultural monuments. Yet in his assessment of the trip, Miller failed to make mention of Baku’s systematic effort to erase Armenian heritage from Artsakh.

Instead, Miller had high praise for his visit to Azerbaijani occupied territories.

“I am so happy to be in Shusha (sic) today,” he said in a video message recorded there and posted on the X social media platform. “We have been preparing for this visit for almost two months and I am glad it has finally come together.”

“I was extremely impressed by my tour and seen first-hand how the city is developing. I look forward to continuing my travels throughout Azerbaijan,” Miller added.

In separate tweets, the U.S Embassy in Baku said Libby met with local Azerbaijani officials who briefed him on “development efforts” there and the return of the town’s former Azerbaijani residents. He also visited Shushi’s “Azerbaijani monuments.”

Satellite images published by CHW show the systematic destruction of the Kanach Zham Church in occupied Shushi

The embassy also made no mention of the two local Armenian churches that have been endangered since the Azerbaijani army captured the town in November 2020. Satellite images released on April 20 by Caucasus Heritage Watch, a U.S.-based research and monitoring group, suggest that one of them, the St. John the Baptist Church, known as Kanach Djam, was destroyed recently.

“The church is now gone,” said the group led by archaeologists at Cornell and Purdue Universities.

Citing other satellite imagery, CHW reported the same day that Azerbaijani authorities have also completed the destruction of Shushi’s old Armenian cemetery.

The other, much bigger local Armenian church, the Holy Savior Cathedral — Ghazanchetsots — was stripped of its conical dome and cross attached to it in 2021. The Armenian government said at the time that this was done for “depriving the Shushi Cathedral of its Armenian identity.” Baku claimed that it is simply renovating the 19th century cathedral damaged by Azerbaijani rockets during the war.