FROM NONSENSE TO NATIONHOOD: A DANGEROUS TRAJECTORY OF AZERBAIJANI NATIONALISM

Part III. REPEATING OLD MISTAKES: THE INSTITUTIONALIZATION OF RACISM AND TERRITORIAL REVISIONISM IN AZERBAIJAN

"Armenia is a fictitious state created on Azerbaijani land ..."

(Excerpted from: Heydar Aliyev, President of the Republic of Azerbaijan, "Decree of the President of Azerbaijan on the Genocide of the Azerbaijanis." 26 March 1998)

The creation of the Azerbaijan Democratic Republic in the Northern Azerbaijan on some of Azerbaijani lands in 1918-1921, and its restoration as the Republic of Azerbaijan in 1991, does not mean that the Azerbaijan national liberation movement is over. … The new stage will end with the creation and or restoration of a united Azerbaijani statehood. … Already [in Iran] there are active organizations, whose sole purpose is the state independence of the Azeri Turks.

(Excerpted from a speech by Abulfaz Elchibey, President of the Republic of Azerbaijan from 1991-1993; delivered at the V Congress [Kurultai] of the Azerbaijan Popular Front Party, 30-31 January 1998,   >>  )

Largely a side effect of the early 20th century oil boom in the Caspian, the general concept of Azeri nationhood was maligned by factors developed during the industrial revolution in the region. Thus, the closest analogue of Azeri nationalistic attitudes toward the Armenians is anti-Semitism, with concomitant ideas of the "universal conspiracy" of purportedly better-educated and more prosperous Armenians against the young Azerbaijani nation. 

These sentiments go back to pre-Soviet times. After the failed Russian revolution of 1905, the Czarist secret police, suspecting Jews and Armenians behind the liberal agitation in Russia, used Cossacks and Azeri bazaar mobs, respectively, for instigating acts of mass hostility against both groups. The result of those policies was the massacre of Armenians in Baku and Nagorno Karabakh by Azeris, which, in turn, coincided with anti-Jewish pogroms in Ukraine, Bessarabia and southern Russia.

The renowned French author of Azeri origin Um-el-Banin, who spent her childhood in Baku, depicts in her memoirs, “Caucasian Days,” the emotional atmosphere among the Azeri nationalist intelligentsia in the beginning of the 20th century. This is how she describes the popular games of Azeri children, who mimicked the behavior of their adult relatives at the time:

“During the holidays we played “Armenian massacres,” which was a game we preferred to all others. Drunk with our racist passions, we used to sacrifice Tamar (who was Armenian by mother) on the altar of our atavistic hatred. First we arbitrarily accused her in the killings of Muslims, and then we executed her immediately, several times in a row, to prolong the pleasure. After that we chopped limbs, tongue, head, and intestines from her body, which were subsequently thrown to the dogs, this for the expression of our scorn for the Armenian flesh ...”

With the mass indiscriminate killings of Armenian civilians in Sumgait, Kirovabad and Baku in 1988-1990, and the attempted genocide in Nagorno Karabakh, this tradition of anti-Armenian violence was revived in Azerbaijan full-scale. The missing ideological conceptualization of hostility directed against Azerbaijan's minority groups was soon formulated, and its most explicit example is the so-called "Decree of the President of Azerbaijan on the Genocide of the Azerbaijanis." The "Decree…" was issued on 26 March 1998 by the Office of the President of the Republic of Azerbaijan and published in most governmental newspapers at the time.[1]

Written in the best traditions of the “Protocols of the Elders of Zion” and Chapter XI of Adolf Hitler's “Mein Kampf,” this document could also be viewed as a concise manifesto that summarizes the main postulates of contemporary Azeri nationalism at large.[2] The publication of the “Decree…” openly legitimized and endorsed the proliferation of racist literature in Azerbaijan, which subsequently snowballed, rapidly becoming an inseparable part of Azeri post-Communist political culture.

The main theme of the "Degree…" is a painstaking yet grotesque story of how "the Armenians" — at large, i.e. as a racial group and an entire people — together with their mysterious but unspecified "patrons" not only have masterminded a centuries-old plot aimed at "eliminating the Azeris," but also have been meticulously implementing it throughout the last 200 years (!). Based on arbitrarily picked false accusations, the text of the “Decree ...” demonizes the victims of Azeri chauvinism, resurrecting an earlier practice widely used during the 1905-1918 pogroms. Despite being an official state document, the "Decree…" is oversaturated with hate language. It opens with a symptomatic introduction, a key component of many racist writings — passage about unmasking a Grand Conspiracy:

"Azerbaijan's attainment of independence made it possible to recreate an objective picture of our people's historical past. Long years of secrecy about which the truth could not be told are being revealed, and the true nature of facts that were falsified at the time is coming to light. The genocide that has been repeatedly committed against the Azeri people, which for a long time was not subjected to proper political and legal assessment, is one of these unopened pages of history."

The "Decree..." tries to prove to the citizens of Azerbaijan — pure and simple — that "the Armenians" are solely responsible for all of their troubles, both old and new: "… all of Azerbaijan's tragedies, which took place in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries ... represented various stages of the Armenians' deliberate and systematic policy of genocide against the Azeris." Hence, the "Decree..." provides a ready-to-use rationale for an average Azeri of why "the Armenians" should be collectively loathed by the "… rising generation [of the Azeris] brought up in the spirit of the great humanistic ideals of Azeri literature and culture."

Racist writings, despite their ugliness are a genre of literature in their own right, with most xenophobic texts bearing structural and thematic similarities. Thus, some parts of the "Decree…" look like they have been directly copied from Hitler's Chapter XI with minor alterations, where word "Jew" is simply changed for "Armenian." Those are the passages that refer to the issues of Jewish or Armenian cultures, respectively, and the alleged exploitation of Marxism/Bolshevism by both groups.

An important feature of the "Decree," and Azeri nationalism at large, is the orientation toward territorial revisionism and ethnic irredentism (i.e. the idea of "reclaiming" lands from neighbors). This line of thought in the "Decree…" is explicated by a bizarre claim that Armenia is an "a fictitious state [created] on Azerbaijani land." Ethnic Azeris in the document are described as "a divided people," torn between the Azerbaijani Republic and Iran, whose northern provinces, so-called "Southern Azerbaijan," are increasingly louder claimed by Azeri agitators in Baku. The "Decree..." vividly demonstrates that Azerbaijan has serious territorial ambitions concerning neighboring countries, with Azeri accusations that Armenia ostensibly eyes part of Azerbaijan serving as a convenient cover-up for the designs of the Azerbaijani revisionist state itself. Failed with the ill-fated encroachment against the Armenians, the proponents of "Greater Azerbaijan from the Caspian to the Black Sea" seem to shift the focus of their activities from Armenia and Karabakh to another neighbor — Iran.

There exists yet another document that is structurally comparable to the "Decree…" It is the "Memorandum of the Serbian Academy of Arts and Sciences" published in 1989. The "Memorandum…" is largely regarded as a guide to the main principles of Milosevic's later designs for Croatia and Bosnia-Herzegovina. Although less emotional than Azerbaijan's “Decree,” the “Memorandum…” too declared that Serbs were the victims of a conspiracy, accompanied by political-economic discrimination by their Croat and Slovene countrymen. This idea contextually provided the reasons of why the vengeful counter-victimization of Muslim Bosnyaks and Croats could be regarded as a righteous cause to pursue.

Given the aggressive and hysterical tone of the “Decree…” as well as manipulations with historical data in the text, it is yet a question whether Azeri elites are able to develop positive long-term policies with regard to Azerbaijan's neighbors and native minority groups. The current stage of the development of Azeri nationalism is distinguished by an array of pathological peculiarities. Still in the full-scale process of active fermentation, Azeri nationalist mythology is affected by the previously suppressed, religion-dipped paradigms of hate that are being revived under the conditions of ethnic conflict. While many newly-born nations of today's world are in search of their ethnic and national roots, as are the Azeris, the mentioned deformities are set to complicate Azerbaijan’s nation-state building efforts and further stifle democracy in the country.

The fear is that in Azerbaijan cultural plagiarism, racial intolerance and attempts to view the relations with neighbors through the prism of neo-pan-Turkist largesse and grandeur tend to penetrate the structure of new post-Communist political institutions in the form of carcinogenic inclusions, capable of affecting the whole political system down the road. 

The history of the Azerbaijani Republic in the post-independence period has already created such a precedent. In 1992, a year after independence, Azerbaijan became the first and to date the only state among the all post-Communist countries which allowed a representative of a neo-fascist group to become a member of the government. Thus, Col. Iskander Hamidov, the leader of the Azeri chapter of “Grey Wolves” (Bozkurt), a Turkish terrorist and neo-fascist organization that structurally models itself on Adolf Hitler’s NSDAP, was appointed Minister of the Interior of Azerbaijan. “Grey Wolves,” whose earlier deeds ranged from the murder of progressive Turkish politicians in the 1970s to the assassination attempt on Pope John Paul II in 1981, are responsible for a bulk of war crimes in Nagorno Karabakh, including the mass slaughter of Armenian civilians in the town of Maragha on 10 April 1992.[3]

After becoming Minister of the Interior, “Grey Wolves”  paramilitary gangs were re-armed and upgraded to become special punitive units — notorious Death Squads — of Azerbaijan's national police. [4] Before the eruption of the first Chechen war, Col. Hamidov and his “Grey Wolves” served as a link between the rebel army of the Chechen commander Dzhohar Dudayev, Turkish intelligence services, and Afghanistan-headquartered terrorist networks. “Grey Wolves” supplied Dudayev's army with weapons, maps, and information. 

The foremost significance of Azerbaijan's "little Mein Kampf" lies in the fact that it politically institutionalized those prejudices toward Azerbaijan’s neighbors and minority groups that earlier existed in Azeri society merely in the form of common folklore. This transformed the ethnic bias into an array of state-promoted routine practices and activities, including the introduction of xenophobic texts into the system of secondary and higher education and the establishment of annual hate festivals — so-called “days of sorrow” (e.g. 20 January, 31 March, etc.). The "days of sorrow" effectively bookmark Azerbaijan's official calendar with the consequent periods of state-sanctioned public grief, perhaps to indicate the different stages of the 200-year-old Grand Conspiracy against Azerbaijan.

The truth, however, is that Armenians and Azeri tribesmen lived in the Caucasus peacefully for decades and even centuries. If we disregard the violent history of the short-lived and Turkic-usurped Karabakh Khanate (1752-1805), the only non-Armenian entity that existed in Nagorno Karabakh, major conflicts between the two groups sprang only in the 20th century, when the political status of the territories with mixed population became problematic. 

It is not a secret that after the demise of Communism, in some Central-East European countries and in the former USSR the resulting vacuum was filled with assorted aggressive ideologies, including anti-Semitism and anti-Semitic-style agitation. However, in none of these countries, save Azerbaijan, did hate-mongering reach the level of a focused state-sponsored policy. Worrisome is the fact that being a classic example of racist literature, the “Decree…” is not a product of the delusional and paranoid mind of a neo-Nazi bigot, but is an official state document issued by the Office of the President of Azerbaijani Republic and signed by the President himself.

The appeal of the "Decree…" is directed to the younger generation of Azeris, urging them to combat external conspirators and stand for "endangered" Azerbaijani statehood. However, as the ranting of Mein Kampf shows, hatred might be enough to mobilize millions of people, but it's no philosophy for success. Hatred that Hitler used to resurrect Germany ultimately destroyed the country and tore the world apart, with most of the world still paying for the waste of the World War II. The virtual motto of today's Azeri nationalist opposition in Baku "toward an expanded Azerbaijan, for ethnic Azeris only" is a dead end for both Azeri foreign and domestic policies. Hence, if not domestically purged and internationally condemned, Azeri nationalist agitation will continue poisoning the regional political atmosphere and undermining peace and the economic re-equilibration of both the Caucasus and the Middle East, giving birth to new chimeras and — concomitant to them — human tragedies.