Los Angeles City Council members will have a dedication ceremony Thursday to name a Westside intersection “Republic of Artsakh Square,” in an effort to raise awareness of the Azerbaijan blockade of Artsakh and its impacts.
Council President Paul Krekorian will be joined at the ceremony by Councilwoman Traci Park, whose Eleventh District includes the newly designated Artsakh Square, and Robert Avetisyan, permanent representative of the Republic of Artsakh to the United States.
In May, the council agreed to designate the intersection of Wilshire Boulevard and Granville Avenue as Artsakh Square in honor of the embattled region that has great meaning for L.A.’s vast Armenian community. According to Krekorian’s office, the dedication ceremony was on hold as city officials waited for street signs to be completed by the Department of Transportation.
The intersection is also the location of the Los Angeles consulate of Azerbaijan.
“Azerbaijan’s dictator has explicitly threatened genocide and called for the expulsion of all Armenians from territories he claims, once again threatening the annihilation of the Armenian people in their ancient homeland,” Krekorian said in a statement when the council approved the renaming of the intersection.
Krekorian previously accused the regime of Azerbaijan President Ilham Aliyev of attempting, over the last 25 years, to erase the history of Armenians in their ancestral homeland — adding that the campaign has intensified since Aliyev’s occupation of Artsakh’s territory in 2020.
The Republic of Artsakh, formerly known as the Republic of Nagorno-Karabakh, seceded from the Soviet Union and formed a democratic state. It is surrounded by the territory of Azerbaijan and only has access to Armenia and the outside world through the Lachin Corridor, which is now being cut off by the armed forces of Azerbaijan.
The territory of the Nagorno Karabakh Republic is internationally recognized as part of Azerbaijan. It is called Artsakh by Armenians.
Azerbaijan’s Consulate General in Los Angeles has accused Armenia of committing atrocities on its land.
“In the early 1990s, Armenia invaded and ethnically cleansed 20% of Azerbaijan’s sovereign territory with impunity. Over 1 million Azerbaijanis were forcibly displaced from their lands (800,000 from occupied districts of Azerbaijan and 250,000 from Armenia),” former Consul General Nasimi Aghayev said last year.
“In 2020, Azerbaijan liberated its territories from Armenia’s illegal and United Nations-condemned occupation. During the war, Armenia bombed our major cities, using even the widely banned cluster munitions (as Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International also confirmed), as a result of which 101 Azerbaijani civilians, including 12 infants and children, were killed, 423 civilians were wounded and 80,000 displaced.”