Genocide Tourism, Occupied Artsakh and the 14-Hour Tour

EDITOR’S NOTE: Asbarez will publish, with regular frequency, prepared by the Center for Armenian Research and Analysis, reports pertaining to Artsakh, in an effort to record the rampant exploitation of Artsakh’s resources and wealth. These reports will focus on what is being built on the currently occupied lands of Artsakh, who is building it, who is paying for it, who is being paid, and who is reaping the blood profits from the destruction of a whole civilization, its people and culture.

SPECIAL FROM THE CENTER FOR ARMENIAN RESEARCH AND ANALYSIS

Fourteen hours out of Baku. Professional guide, comfortable transport, entry to all sites, hotel pickup. Guides available in English, Russian, Italian, Turkish, and Spanish. Listed among the inclusions, without comment or explanation: “Permission to enter Karabakh zone.”

You can book it on Marriott’s own platform. You will earn Marriott Bonvoy points.

Read the itinerary and you arrive at the tenth stop–a monument every Armenian can picture without being told its name: Babik-Mamik, “We Are Our Mountains,” the Grandmother and Grandfather.

Hewn from volcanic tuff, set into the heights above Stepanakert, Marriott’s copy calls it “one of the most well-known landmarks in the Karabakh region,” a “notable example of regional stone art and architecture.” However, the word Armenian appears nowhere in the listing, in the description, anywhere. Not beside the monument, not beside the university built in occupied Stepanakert, not beside the parliament building of a republic that existed for thirty-two years and was extinguished in a week, the home of a land and people that has existed and flourished for millenia.

The tour promises visitors “the rebirth of a region,” a land “now welcoming visitors after decades.”

After decades of what? The sentence declines to say. That silence is not sloppy copywriting. It is part of the plan.

This is the condition of Artsakh in 2026.

In September 2023, after a nine-month blockade that starved a population of food, fuel, and medicine, Azerbaijan emptied the land of more than 120,000 indigenous Armenians in a matter of days, the completion of an ethnic cleansing, and by the assessment of former prosecutors of the International Criminal Court, a genocide.

Armenian hostages remain in Baku’s prisons, hostages to this day. At least eighty forcibly disappeared and more than two hundred missing persons remain unaccounted for, and Azerbaijan is not meeting its obligation to investigate or acknowledge a single one of them.

What follows the emptying is the erasure. Churches are destroyed or “restored” into something else, culture, identity appropriated. Cemeteries vanish. Stepanakert becomes Khankendi, Shushi becomes Shusha, Akna becomes Aghdam, and the crime becomes a “Great Return,” $14 billion in “reconstruction,” glossy urban-development panels, and a global media forum convened in occupied Shushi to teach the world’s journalists the “correct” vocabulary to present murder and genocide as restoration and sovereignty.

And, this is where the West arrives. Not as witness; as both vendor and customer.

Anglo Asian Mining, listed in London, issued a press release in 2020 welcoming the “liberation” of territory it intended to mine, and today it extracts gold, among other undisclosed ores, from Artsakh soil; a sitting U.S. Senate candidate holds a stake in it worth up to $5 million, his largest single disclosed investment. Italy’s Ansaldo Energia supplies the substations. The German-Azerbaijani Chamber of Commerce ran a “Karabakh Strategic Reconstruction Mission” this spring, walking business leaders through Kovsakan, Berdzor, occupied Shushi, Stepanakert, and Akna in search of opportunity. Slovakia’s president toured the ruins in July and went home to arrange export financing. The United Nations lent its World Urban Forum to Baku, where officials discussed “restoring destroyed identity” in cities whose identity they had just destroyed.

Marriott International notes that its activities platform operates under license rather than direct ownership. The domain is Marriott’s. The brand is Marriott’s. The loyalty points are Marriott’s. A corporation does not get to franchise its name onto the whitewashing of a crime against humanity and then plead that the paperwork sits with a subcontractor.

The Center for Armenian Research and Analysis (CARA) is a trans-national research institute that provides investigative, analytic, and informational resources to public and private entities across the Armenian experiential spectrum.

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