On September 11, 2026, Hikmet Hajiyev, a senior aide to Azerbaijan’s president, led around 150 representatives from 58 countries and nine international organizations to Gandzasar, a 13th-century Armenian monastery in Nagorno-Karabakh, known to Armenians as Artsakh.
In a region emptied of its Armenian population through ethnic cleansing, Hajiyev sought to “explain” that Armenians had no connection to the area. To the rest of the world, Gandzasar is known as the site that, until recently, housed a key Christian relic: the head of St. John the Baptist.
Magdalena Grono, the EU Special Representative for the South Caucasus, was on the tour. Afterward, she said,
"there does not seem to be an agreement between Armenia and Azerbaijan when it comes to the historical facts."
She did not specify which facts were in dispute. The inscriptions on the walls of Gandzasar are in Armenian. Four days later, after the outcry, she clarified:
"I certainly do not contest the past Armenian presence and rich footprint in former conflict-affected areas in Karabakh."
A Dynasty the West Chose to Embrace
History often follows a pattern: the international community embraces dictators who rule resource-rich states and becomes responsible for their rise and long tenure. Yet while history never fails to remind us of these lessons, the international community often fails to internalize them.
Azerbaijan has been ruled for more than three decades by an authoritarian regime controlled by a single family, the Aliyevs. They have established a non-monarchic authoritarian system that completed a two-generation hereditary succession, the first of its kind in the region. There are clear signs that the Aliyev family will continue to rule the country in the foreseeable future, given that the first lady, Mehriban Aliyeva, was appointed First Vice President of Azerbaijan by her husband in 2017. Their son, Heydar Aliyev, named after his grandfather, holds no official government positions but is often present at high-level economic and state meetings with his parents.
Even so, when President Aliyev was “reelected” in February 2024, marking more than two decades in office and following the ethnic cleansing of Armenians in Nagorno-Karabakh in September 2023 that he ordered, Charles Michel, the former president of the European Council, was among the first to congratulate the Azerbaijani leader on his election victory.
When Energy Matters More Than European Values
Aliyev, known for using threats, ultimatums, and derogatory language against the sovereign state of Armenia and the Armenian people worldwide, calls the entire sovereign territory of the Republic of Armenia “Western Azerbaijan,” which he claims must be returned to the area’s indigenous people, namely the people of Azerbaijan. The EU’s response? On July 18, 2022, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen signed a memorandum to double Azerbaijani gas exports to the bloc by 2027 and to designate Baku as a strategic partner.
Azerbaijan’s human rights record is deplorable; opposition activists, independent journalists, and dissidents alike are persecuted and jailed. Aliyev rules the country with an iron fist, and Azerbaijan has earned a score of zero out of forty on political rights from Freedom House. Azerbaijan is part of multiple partnerships with the EU, all of which require economic, political, and human rights reforms. He ignored them all, and not a single condemnation came from Brussels. In contrast, Georgia has been treated as a political outcast due to its pro-Russian policies, despite a much stronger record of governance and the rule of law. The EU often applies double standards among the six members of the Eastern Partnership Initiative.
Brussels could no longer hide its open secret: business and economic interests outweigh Azerbaijan's aggression in Artsakh, which former ICC chief prosecutor Luis Moreno Ocampo concluded constituted genocide. The EU continues to talk out of both sides of its mouth, undermining the very values its institutions were established to uphold.
The Questions Nobody Asked
None of the Western diplomats attending that shameful tour raised the issue of the ethnic cleansing of the indigenous Armenian population of Artsakh, who were starved, raped, killed, and forcibly displaced in September 2023.
None of the Western diplomats raised the question of the Armenian POWs and civilians who are illegally held in Baku's dungeons and subjected to inhuman treatment.
None of them raised Azerbaijan's continued occupation of sovereign Armenian territory or addressed the "Western Azerbaijan" propaganda narrative, which is nothing but a declaration of perpetual war against the Armenian state.
Instead, they ignored abandoned houses, destroyed churches and other historical monuments, and Armenian cemeteries in Artsakh, and never asked where the local Armenians had gone.
Not one of the 58 delegations has since raised any of this publicly.
We hope the day will come when, in addition to the Azerbaijani leadership, certain European officials will also be held accountable for their complicity and facilitation.
What the European Union Must Do
In the meantime, we call on the EU to ensure that:
No EU diplomat participates in state-organized tours of depopulated territory without independent access or without meeting the displaced people;
The next stage of the energy memorandum will be contingent on verifiable UNESCO access to Armenian heritage sites; and
The EU makes the release of all Armenian POWs a precondition for further engagement with Baku.
Western diplomats stood in a thirteenth-century Armenian cathedral and were told it was never Armenian. Not one of them disputed the claim. There is an Armenian proverb for this: “The sun won't stay behind the cloud.”
