Edmon Marukyan, member of Armenian Parliament delegation to PACE delivered a speech at the session on April 19. His message reads:
"On April 12th, 2021, the public TV in Azerbaijan broadcasted an hour-long programme inaugurating a new museum in Baku to celebrate the victory in the forty-four-day Nagorno-Karabakh War. In this show of terror, the president of Azerbaijan, Ilham Aliyev, was seen proudly walking around in a military uniform showing off the Armenian military equipment and the life-size installation of the wax figures parodying the Armenian soldiers.
The centerpiece of the so-called “Park of Trophies” was a long pathway made from the helmets of killed and captured Armenian soldiers. All of this took place not in an unknown state, but in one of the member state of the Council of Europe - Azerbaijan.
Azerbaijan is the country that continues to illegally hold more then 200 Armenians prisoners of war. Please take a minute and look at the photos I am holding. Those are not photos from the past, it is nowadays, when Azerbaijan considers normal to chain people and present human degrading treatment and torture as a regular attitude towards prisoners of war. On one of the photos an Azeri child is playing playfully, innocently with a racist caricature of an Armenian soldier who is currently languishing, and likely being tortured in an Azerbaijani jail. By this action Aliyev joined the list of such dictators as Hitler and Saddam Hussein.
This is true fascism. The opening of such a 'park' clearly confirms institutional hatred towards Armenians in Azerbaijan. At the meanwhile what is going on in Azerbaijan now reminded me of Iraq in the late 1980s, when another dictator utilized five thousand Iranian helmets of the killed soldiers extracted from the battlefield to complete the monument that he had called the “Victory Arch”. That man was Saddam Hussein.
Like Hussein, Aliyev thinks that this is what will help him to glorify the strength of the bloodthirsty army. Like Hussein, Aliyev decides not to return the prisoners of war. This park clearly shows the aggressive identity of Azerbaijani authorities and their real face – they promote racial hatred, consider ill-treatment and torture normal behavior to be presented and show to the next generations and the entire World. Dear colleagues, The history has proven, if necessary steps are not taken on time to stop dictators and their aggression, it usually stops being a local issue and spreads all over the World. I do call on your attention and hope that necessary and argent measures will be taken to condemn the Arerbaijani actions leading to promote ill-treatment and humiliation.
The so called Trophy Park must be closed!"
