200 YEARS WERE NOT ENOUGH

It is quite natural that Armenia has still not completed the process of renaming population centres that have Turkic roots. Armenia will never be able to digest the tremendous cultural-historical potential of Azerbaijan, which is why even the 200 years that have passed since the resettlement of Armenians to the Caucasus were not enough for them to give Armenian names to all population centres, the head of the political research department of the presidential administration, Fuad Akhundov, said while commenting on the latest statement by the head of the State Real Estate Registry of Armenia, Manuk Vardanyan.

"If Armenia is going to remove all visual traces of Azerbaijani history, they will have to change not only thousands of words and names, but also the surnames of millions of Armenians created by adding the Persian ending "yan" to an Azerbaijani word. In this case, it will be necessary to start with the word "Kochari" which means resettled. Incidentally, does this word not remind you of anything?" he pointed out.

Vardanyan had stated earlier that the process of renaming the republic's population centres "whose names have Turkic roots" should be completed this year. He pointed out that 57 population centres were renamed in 2006 and 21 other population centres will be renamed this year. Vardanyan also admitted that the delay in this process is related to the fact that "these cities and villages have problems with selecting a new name".

Akhundov believes that this confession by Vardanyan proves once again that the territory of present-day Armenia has always been populated by a Turkic population.

"Note that what they are talking about is not returning previous historical names to these population centres, but inventing new Armenian names for former historical Azerbaijani place names. Every Turkic place name in Armenia has its own historical name and meaning. It is easy to give up those place names, but it is difficult to find a historical and meaningful explanation for the origin of new names," Akhundov said.

He said that "the same was done in Soviet times and not only in Armenia, but also in Azerbaijan when Moscow changed ancient and medieval names to modern ones with the help of people like Mikoyan and Stalin. For example, Khankandi (Khan's village) was renamed Stepanakert in honour of revolutionary Stepan."

Akhundov said that what is going on in Armenia is in fact historical genocide as the country's authorities, having completed the ethnic cleansing of the population, have started ethnic cleansing of place names, the history of their origin and the history of Azerbaijanis who lived in Armenia. "With the connivance of the world public and scientific community, an individual country is destroying and rewriting the history of many centuries. This is being done openly, barefacedly and demonstratively," he stressed.

"Today we can observe what rough methods 'the reporters of Armenian history' are using. Inventing a new name and then the history of its origin, they are inventing a new history of all of Armenia," Akhundov said.

"However, history is an accurate science and it is impossible to distort it by renaming and distorting historical monuments and place names. If in Soviet times Armenians managed to preserve the so-called white stains of history using bans imposed by the Central Committee of the CPSS and the Soviet Academy of Sciences, times are different now and, owing to President Ilham Aliyev's confident policy, Azerbaijan is becoming not only an industrial and political, but also a scientific centre of the entire region," he said.

"The Azerbaijani president seriously intends to create maximum conditions for the free development of historical science to erase the white stains, misunderstandings and falsifications from the history of the region, and this is the beginning of the end of attempts to distort and falsify history using various resolutions," Akundov pointed out.

"The recent events to mark the 15th anniversary of Khojaly, participation of historians, politicians and diplomats in them, and as a result, another information-political breakthrough already demonstrate the uselessness of attempts to falsify this historical event," Akhundov stressed.