Armenophobia in Azerbaijan

Ex-president of Azerbaijan, Heydar Aliyev: Comrades! The entire life, short but vivid and full of profound meaning, the life of a professional revolutionary, versatile party and state activities of Stepan Shahumyan are a symbol of his selfless fight for freedom and the welfare of the working people, for the triumph of the communism ideals. <…> Back in March 1918, Musavatists provoked an anti-Soviet rebellion in Baku intending to quench the Soviet authority. Thanks to the resolute and firm measures taken by Bolsheviks, the rebellion was suppressed. Bolsheviks of Azerbaijan spared no effort in their struggle for the development of socialist revolution in all directions. Despite intrigues of the bourgeois nationalists, in defiance of a mortal danger they propagated in masses – in plants and workshops, in villages and provinces – the truth of the Lenin doctrine. The titanic labor of the chairman of the council of popular commissars of Baku could be seen in all reforms of the commune. Sultan Majid Afandiyev dedicated this figurative statement on him: “Stepan Shahumyan is the guiding hand of the Commune of Baku, its mastermind, knowledge, and thought… The compelling logic of his discourse hit and crushed the enemies of the Commune. He is the favorite leader of the army of oil industry workers” <…> the noble image of Stepan Georgievich Shahumyan is an inspiration for all generations of workers <…>. And today, with pride and love we say that this great son of the Armenian people, Stepan Shahumyan, is also a son of the Azerbaijani people, all peoples of the Transcaucasia, all multinational and united Soviet people (long and thunderous ovation).⁷⁹

Latent perception implies the use of administrative resources with clear armenophobic tendencies against the background of ‘friendship’, ‘brotherhood’ and ‘solidarity’. This very administrative resource became the instrument of self-assertion in the region and, particularly on Armenian territories, and became the locomotive of the ambition to rewrite one’s own history, to find more ancient roots, ancient statehood, to define one’s own unique place and contribution into the treasury of the human civilization as well as to change the regional demographics. And all this occurred in contrast and comparison with Armenians.

Ex-president of Azerbaijan, Heydar Aliyev: In the future, we must create works so as they continuously and constantly prove the claims of Azerbaijan to the lands that host today’s Armenia. We must do this. We must pave the way for generations to come.⁸⁰

These words uttered back in 1999 are a telltale evidence of the succession of the policy initiated back in the Soviet period as confessed unequivocally by H. Aliev.

Heydar Aliyev, ex-president of Azerbaijan: “<…> I speak of the period when I was the first secretary and contributed a lot to the development of Nagorno-Karabakh. At the same time I sought to change the demographics of the region. Nagorno-Karabakh raised the issue of establishing an institute, a university there. <…> I thought and I decided to do so. But with one condition; there should be three sectors: Azerbaijani, Russian and Armenian. <…> Azerbaijanis from the neighboring regions were directed not to Baku but there. We also sent Azerbaijanis from the adjoining regions. I took this and other measures trying to increase the number of Azerbaijanis in Nagorno-Karabakh and to crop the number of Armenians.⁸¹

This was reflected not only in words but in actions: curtailing the rights and possibilities of Armenians as an ethnic unit to favor the Azerbaijani population. This was not the first but the most flagrant fact of mass discrimination in the history of the Soviet Azerbaijan, and it was quite purposeful and targeted.

Perception in the daily life: along with the development and progress of Azerbaijan, the country became caught between two worlds. On the one hand, there was Baku with its Europe-oriented upper class with its flexibility, moderation and openness; on the other hand, was the remaining part of the country, a huge social stratum that was retrograde and remained at the level of ‘ummah’, with its typical apathy and impassiveness towards the secular authority, with the traditional practice of docility and the customary religiousness.

A very illustrative example of xenophobia in daily life is described in an autobiographic essay by Vahid Ghazi.⁸²

My grandmother used to tell us stories: “When we were kids, Armenians massacred many Turkic people. At the time, they called us Turkic. They killed us everywhere. They cut off the nipples of the women, laced them in strings and threw into our trenches. Those who could not stand it and stepped forward were shot down. They tied hot samovars on the backs of the people and made them run…”

But my grandmother never told me: “You must also hate Armenians!” I know, I heard that Armenians bring up their children with a feeling of hatred to Turkic peoples and Azerbaijanis. We did not have any such practice. The hatred links to memory and ours retained no vestige of it.

It must be noted that in their interactions with Azerbaijani who referred to facts based on their personal experience, all tentative of the Armenian side to hear a single confirmed example of Armenian children brought up “in the spirit of hatred to all Turkic” remained without response.

The testimony narrating the reaction of ordinary Azerbaijanis to the devastating earthquake of 1988 in Armenia is quite illustrative in the context of aggressive armenophobia.

General Alexander Lebed: The events unfolded with a relative calm up to December 7. In the evening of December 7, the news release of ‘Vremya’ announced that Armenia suffered a tremendous earthquake. <…>. The silence was suddenly broken by a sound, or to be more precise, by an entire roar of sounds that merged into a single general howl of triumph and glee that increased in intensity. <…> In an attempt to ascertain the nature of these sounds, I went out on the balcony along with another five or six officers.

<…> On the opposite side of the street, right across the building of the Regional Executive Committee there was a big nine-story residential block. All windows in the building were alight without exception; people on the balconies yelled, screamed, hooted and roared with wild laughter. Down went empty bottles, burning paper and some other objects. This nine-story residential block was not alone in its expression of cannibalistic mirth. The picture was identical in all adjoining buildings. The entire district beamed and howled in a frantic frenzy.

People that considered themselves civilized, educated to a certain extent and well-mannered, some of them supposedly religious and following the covenants of the Quran were united in this inappropriate barbarian celebration of a tremendous human tragedy. I felt a strong urge to cross out this cursed residential block with a long burst of my assault rifle. This could be the only way to make people degraded to apes claim back their humanity. How many merry, kind reasonable, hospitable people I met among Azerbaijanis! The discourse of many of them was so full of passion and conviction! Where have all these reasonable and kind people gone? How could it be possible that they all dissolved in this scum yielding to an impulse, the extent of heinousness of which is hard to define? This was a riddle to me. There can be only one interim and sad conclusion: any stage of civilization, any upper form of social and economic life is separated from feudalism and even the savage horde by a single step backwards, only one step… It takes just certain conditions, and people immediately prove themselves capable of showing that they climbed down the trees only very recently.⁸³

Vardges Bagratovich Artsruni, head of the construction complex of Armenia: The Soviet Union still existed, and help streamed into the disaster zone from all parts of the country. Azerbaijan too had sent some fuel tanks by railway. The fuel tanks bore writing: “Congratulations with the earthquake! We wish you another one!” The train was sent back, and it became clear that there would be no reconciliation. This is impossible to forget. A little later, it became known that trains carrying food and humanitarian aid which passed by railway through Azerbaijan were rolled over to reserve tracks at Azerbaijani stations. Refrigerators were turned off for several days, and after meat and other foodstuffs became spoiled the train was sent on into the disaster zone. Mix trucks carrying cement were filled with water and after staying idle for 2 or 3 days were sent into the disaster zone. The construction and other machinery loaded onto platforms reached the regions of Armenia hit by the earthquake not only with shattered windshields but with everything else that could be broken (doors, windows, etc.). Following that, full blockade of the railway and road communication ensued.⁸⁴

In December 1988, Armenia was hit by a disastrous earthquake that destroyed entire cities and claimed a death toll of many thousand lives. The entire world stretched a helping hand with humanitarian cargoes reaching Armenia from different parts of the world. Azerbaijan too sent trains, but they were loaded with crutches and nails for coffins.⁸⁵

The parallel existence of three separate sets of values which were equally fostered and promoted ultimately led to an internal conflict within the Azerbaijani society which at the outburst of the first conflicts with Armenia revealed itself in line with the non-Soviet ideology instilled in the minds of the people in the following fashion: to take revenge on Armenians, to show them their place, to destroy them.

Decline of the Soviet period – Independent Azerbaijan

By the late twentiеth century as the Soviet Union collapsed, with a conflict between Armenian and Azerbaijan and a de-facto military, another round of rethinking history, self-identification, comparison (or contrast) with Armenians commenced, but this time it was on different precepts. Now Armenians were portrayed in a new quality as “not indigenous people”, as “weeds that must be pulled out”, as a “cancerous tumor” etc.

We shall not dwell on the chronological order of the conflict and all ensuing consequences, but we shall examine the ideology that served as the background against which these events unfolded. Considering the fact that the Soviet press was still censored, nationalistic ideas were instilled in the minds of the people through the ideologist-consumer system on public rallies, in self-published leaflets or through rumors.

The first public rallies were held with anti-Armenian slogans of Khalil Rza Uluturk, the poet of freedom and patriotism:

Original ⁸⁶

 
Bakımızı əzizləyək.
Əqrəblərdən təmizləyək!
Şölə versin bu ləl, mərcan
Ermənisiz Azərbaycan!
 

Translation

 
Let us cherish our Baku
and purge it of scorpions!
Let it glim, our ruby of Azerbaijan
without Armenians!”
 

The Russian historian Andrey Polonskiy in his article Islam and Establishment of National Self-identity by the 1980-90s writes that “Azerbaijan had a less significant share of relaxed humanism compared to the majority of the Soviet republics. The crisis of Karabakh and increasing level of armenophobia contributed to shaping a well-defined image of the enemy which had a known impact on the character of this new identity (it was originally based on aggression and was victory-oriented)”.⁸⁷

The tendencies and notions of denigrating Armenians and repudiating completely any contexts, comparisons or benchmarks with them going as far as to deny their very presence in the region were recalled to life and put into practice. The new historiography that swarmed with unabashed falsifications ranked very high in this policy of instilling and propagating armenophobia.

The most favored practice of Azerbaijani authors was renaming medieval Armenian political figures, historians and writers who lived and worked in Karabakh turning them into Albanians. In this way, Movses Kaghankatvatsi who had written in the Armenian language metamorphosed into the Albanian historian Moisey Kalankatuyski. The same lot was reserved for the Armenian prince Sahly ibn-Sumbat (Armenians preferred to call him Sahl Smbatyan) who underwent a transmutation becoming half-Albanian, half-Azerbaijani.⁸⁸

The academician Farida Mamedova who is a fiery preacher of the myth on Albanian (that is Azerbaijani) origin of Karabakh abuses the fact that the Azerbaijani readership does not know Armenian to deliberately mislead it. Thus, in her book entitled The History of Caucasian Albania, as evidence of “Armenian falsifications” she publishes a photograph of a stone slab carrying an inscription in Armenian which is rotated at 180 degrees⁸⁹ and tagged as a “fragment of a genuine (Albanian) slab from the church in the village of Dash Salakhli of Qazakh region”⁹⁰. The inscription is so crisp that any person familiar with Armenian and Armenian script can read it without any special training.

Without dwelling on numerous scholarly self-contradictions,⁹¹ we must only underscore that using her feigned knowledge of the Armenian language and misleading her readership is the keynote of her entire scientific activity and scholarly works. In this way, in an attempt to prove the Albanian origins of Gandzasar Monastery⁹² located in Nagorno-Karabakh, she resorts to the same trick used earlier and passes the Armenian language for Albanian:

I saw the inscription in Gandzasar in 1978 when I was there along with Azerbaijani scientists accompanied by Armenians of Karabakh for this very purpose. On my way there I already knew of the existence of this inscription in the Gandzasar monastery made at the behest of Hassan Jalal which reads specifically as follows: “… I built this cathedral for my Albanian people” (in Albanian: – imaguvaniazgn).⁹³

The scholar that claims knowledge of the Armenian and ‘Albanian’ languages affirms that imaguvaniazg is an Albanian word while, actually, it contains three Armenian words: ‘im’ – my (իմ), ‘aguanits’ from Aghvan (Աղվանից) and ‘azg’ clan (ազգ) merged into a single word ‘in Albanian language’, and with the same meaning for that matter. But the most interesting thing is that no such inscription has ever existed in Gandzasar.⁹⁴ This is a blatant example of an egregious falsification of the modern times.

The school curriculum was purged from Armenian authors (this particularly refers to the works of the first people’s writer of Azerbaijan, Alexander Shirvanzadeh⁹⁵). The literary works by Azerbaijani authors of the turn of the 19th century viewed as classics of Azerbaijani literature which portrayed Armenians in the positive light and contained appeals for brotherhood and peace (works of Sabir, Hajibekov⁹⁶, and Mirza Jalil⁹⁷) were expunged.

Enlightenment advocates of the early 20th century were replaced by the partisans of ideology and propaganda that appealed to a national unity balked by Armenians.

“Glory to the heroes of Sumgait” was the slogan of the public rallies bringing together thousands of people in the city of Baku.

Bakhtiyar Vahabzadeh, people’s writer of Azerbaijan: The time will come when we will realize the courage and heroic deeds of plain Azerbaijani guys in Sumgait who started the purge of our country from the Armenian filth.⁹⁸

In his book entitled Polygon of Azerbaijan, Aris Kazinyan notes an essential role of rumors as a main propaganda weapon of all times in shaping the behavior of ignorant popular masses.⁹⁹

It is very illustrative that at the beginning of the past century many journalists, missionaries and diplomats who worked either in the Ottoman Empire or in the Transcaucasia noted that the very fact of rumors about violent acts against Muslims at the hands of Armenian was the symptom of a forthcoming massacre, an anticipation of new Armenian pogroms. There is an amazing continuity not only in the rites of violence, but also in the pretexts for perpetrating it. On the eve of every Armenian massacre Ottomans and Turkish Tatars spread false rumors about carnage of Muslim populations at the hands of ‘gyavurs’ in some remote areas, about Armenian plans to attack Turkish districts in specific cities. <…> In 1905, the newspaper Tiflis Leaflet (Тифлиский Листок) published a report on the situation in the Eastern Caucasia: “In the mid-August, the provinces of Aresh, Jevanshir and other places were upset by a gruesome rumor: it was claimed that Armenians attacked peaceful nomads near the village of Vank and massacred many women and children. Three hundred armed horsemen from Aghdam moved into the area only to find out that there had been a skirmish about seven stolen sheep, with two Tatars killed and several Armenians wounded. Such conflicts happened every year and involved more severe bloodshed. But the formal pretext was found (Tiflis Leaflet, 21.08.1905)¹⁰⁰.

On the eve of the Sumgait massacre, the same traditional scenario came into play: certain individuals appeared in Baku, Sumgait and other regions of Azerbaijan telling the stories of Azerbaijani pogroms in Kapan (Kafan) region of Armenia and displaced compatriots.

A similar scenario was staged in January 1990 during the massacre of Armenians in Baku. An eyewitness of these events, the Colonel V. Anokhin reported: “I am sure that the more fantastic the lie is, the higher are the odds that people will be taken in. The deception techniques are sometimes monstrous. For instance, a public rally is held in the neighboring district to commemorate 1000 dead in Kurdamir. When I tell the residents of Kurdamir about it, they are astounded; they surely know that there is not a single loss of life there. However, they themselves go around telling stories of forty thousand Azerbaijanis killed in Baku”.¹⁰¹

As a result, all things that caused the alarm and concern of Azerbaijani thinkers again led to the frustration of Azerbaijani intellectuals rather than consolidated it.

Mirmehdi Agaoghlu, writer: My views of Armenians were shaped amid the famous slogan: “He, who does not sit, is Armenian”. The events on the central square began with millions of people squatting and standing up following this command. Just like the grown-ups, we, the kids, had a slogan of our own: “Wherever you see Armenian, hit him on the head with a pail”. We had but one enemy: the Armenian enemy. We heard this propaganda from the Azerbaijani television, we were taught this at school. The Armenian ‘dyga’¹⁰² were our enemies. We grew up amid this hatred towards Armenians. The state machinery of propaganda portrayed Armenians as a fictitious people that never had statehood, parasites and cheap prostitutes who lived off other countries. <…> Do you want to know the truth? In the past 20–25 years, your own historians and authors of propaganda told you lies. On the top of it, Armenian sources also indulge in exaggeration. Now try to distinguish fiction from reality. Every time I saw Armenian actors, scientists or representatives of other spheres of life on Russian channels, I felt resentment but still asked myself the question: If they are indeed such a tiny little nation that we can easily be done with, why do we come across them everywhere? Why are we not like them?

So, gradually the hatred inside me transformed into a complex of inferiority. And I felt angry because I had been deceived all this time.¹⁰³

Journalist Farheddin Hajibeyli: Why do we always suffer a defeat? There is no one to blame except us, boycott YOURSELVES!

Nobody is head over ears in love with black eyebrows and eyes of Armenians. They accomplished what they have today after decades of hard work. Let us consider them our enemies cursing and abusing them, but for the sake of justice we must recognize their right to all these victories, as they have been accomplished due to their intellect and foresight. <…> Now, let us be honest: who is more worthy of victories? Us or them?¹⁰⁴

After the country’s independence, the Azerbaijani quest for national identity and consolidation through inculcation and cultivation of the image of the external Armenian enemy by manipulating the public mind was given free rein through self-expression.