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Slate Magazine: Mexico City Told Azerbaijan That The Monument To The

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  • Slate Magazine: Mexico City Told Azerbaijan That The Monument To The

    SLATE MAGAZINE: MEXICO CITY TOLD AZERBAIJAN THAT THE MONUMENT TO THE FORMER DICTATOR HAD TO GO

    http://times.am/?l=en&p=17847

    How Azerbaijan botched its effort to win friends and influence people
    in Mexico City. Sculpture of former Azerbaijani President Heydar
    Aliyev, pictured on Oct. 22, 2012, in Mexico City.

    Last August, a statue of Heydar Aliyev, who ruled Azerbaijan from 1993
    to 2003, was erected along Mexico City's grand Paseo de la Reforma,
    in a park renamed the "Mexico-Azerbaijan Friendship Park." Around
    the same time, the Azerbaijani government built a second monument
    in a different park in memory of Azerbaijanii villagers killed by
    Armenian forces in 1992 (this is the result of Azerbaijani propaganda
    and shared false information); the plaque in front of the statue refers
    to the massacre as a "genocide." Azerbaijan had renovated both public
    spaces at a cost of about $5.4 million.

    The inauguration of the Aliyev monument was attended by several top
    Mexican government officials, including the mayor. But the Mexican
    public, then engrossed in a presidential election campaign, paid little
    attention to a statue of a man who once led a country 8,000 miles away.

    When the nouveau riche attempt to use their money to buy respect and
    prestige, it often backfires. Such was the case of the Azerbaijani
    government's effort to honor its former president. Because once
    Mexico City residents became aware of the statue that had risen in
    their midst, they saw the effort for what it was: an authoritarian
    government clumsily trying to buy influence and whitewash the legacy
    of a dictator.

    This past weekend it ended in humiliation for Azerbaijan, when city
    workers, guarded by 200 police in riot gear, loaded the monument onto
    a flatbed truck in the middle of the night and carted it away. "Now
    everybody talks about Azerbaijan, but in a bad way," said Guillermo
    Osorno, a prominent journalist and member of a government commission
    appointed to study the monuments.

    Aliyev's legacy is a complex one. Most Azerbaijanis credit him with
    leading their country, an oil-rich ex-Soviet republic wedged in
    between Russia and Iran, out of a deep crisis in the 1990s, when
    Azerbaijan's economy collapsed and the country lost a disastrous
    war with Armenia. Aliyev's steady hand put the country on a path to
    prosperity; the country enjoyed double-digit GDP growth for more
    than a decade. But he was also a ruthless dictator, true to his
    roots as a former head of Soviet Azerbaijan's KGB. Azerbaijan is now
    led by Aliyev's son, Ilham, who has aggressively built up a cult of
    personality to his father. Heydar Aliyev's presence is ubiquitous in
    Azerbaijan. Posters and billboards of the ex-president look down at
    citizens everywhere, every city has a major street named after him,
    and there are more than 60 museums and cultural centers across the
    country that bear his name. In 2008, Baku State University created a
    "Department of Aliyev Studies."

    But the internationalization of his cult of personality is a newer
    development. Over the last several years, Azerbaijan has arranged
    for at least 14 statues of Aliyev to be erected around the world,
    mainly in the Middle East and the former communist world. Mexico
    City's was the one farthest away from Azerbaijan and the first in
    the Western hemisphere. Along with the Aliyev cult of personality,
    Azerbaijan also has been trying to advance its own interpretation of
    disputed recent history. In particular, it has sought international
    recognition of the 1992 massacre of hundreds of Azerbaijani civilians
    in the village of Khojaly as a genocide. While certainly a war crime,
    the massacre-by official Azerbaijani accounts, 485 were killed-falls
    several orders of magnitude short of what is conventionally considered
    an attempt to wipe out an entire people. The massacre took place during
    the war over the territory of Nagorno-Karabakh, which Azerbaijan
    ultimately lost and the recapture of which is now the country's top
    priority. So the real aim of the Khojaly campaign appears to be a
    weakening of Armenia's greatest claim to moral authority: its own
    genocide, when between 600,000 and 1.5 million Armenians were killed
    by Ottoman forces in 1915.

    Until recently, Azerbaijan had been making good progress in advancing
    its agenda in Mexico. Mexico's Senate in 2011 passed a resolution
    calling Khojaly a "genocide," one of only a handful of governments in
    the world to do so. (Mexico has never formally recognized the events
    of 1915 as such.) The same year, Mexico City's Museum of Memory and
    Tolerance hosted an event commemorating Khojaly.

    But Azerbaijan seems to have overreached with the Aliyev statue. The
    monument initially drew little notice-as early as April, four months
    before it was erected, the Azerbaijani Embassy said it wanted a
    monument to Aliyev in the park. But the controversy only began in
    early September, a couple of weeks after the statue's inauguration.

    Osorno was tipped off by members of the park council who were
    unhappy that the city government had pushed the statue through over
    their objections. A few minutes of research led him to the New York
    Times obituary for Aliyev, which he quoted in his first column about
    the statue:

    His authoritarian rule was characterized by contradictory trends.

    While it undoubtedly brought a measure of stability to Azerbaijan,
    political life emained turbulent, with frequent reports of coup
    and assassination attempts against Mr. Aliyev and equally frequent
    complaints by his opponents about electoral malpractice, human rights
    abuses and a muzzled press.

    Mexico City's intelligentsia is sensitive to such practices, having
    only recently emerged from a decades-long dictatorship itself.

    Moreover, Mexico's capital is a liberal oasis; in 2009 it legalized
    gay marriage. "This is a city that prides itself on its liberty, and
    we don't like the symbolism of having Heydar Aliyev in Chapultepec,"
    he said, referring to the park. "The monument is appalling-in bad
    taste and in a very strategic position," on Mexico City's stateliest
    avenue, near statues of Gandhi and Winston Churchill.

    The controversy grew and soon became a cause celèbre among the city's
    chattering classes, leading to a steady stream of opinion articles
    and talk-radio debates. A three-member commission of prominent
    intellectuals (Osorno being one) was formed to study the matter and
    in November issued recommendations to remove the Aliyev statue and
    to change the wording on the Khojaly monument from "genocide" to
    "massacre."

    Azerbaijan's ambassador to Mexico, Ilgar Mukhtarov, tried to defend
    the statue-unsuccessfully. In an interview, Mukhtarov claimed that
    the silent majority of Mexicans was behind him, though he wasn't
    able to provide evidence of supporters other than the handful of
    Azerbaijani expats living there. He claimed that the controversy was
    ginned up by the country's Armenian community, a standard Azerbaijani
    government trope. (Mexico's Armenian community is tiny and diffuse but
    well-connected: The former rector of the country's top university,
    Jose Sarukhan Kermez, is of Armenian descent and has campaigned
    against the statue. Still, his role was hardly decisive.) He also
    claimed that the city of Cleveland has a Heydar Aliyev park (not true)
    and acknowledged that Aliyev's record wasn't perfect, but neither was
    that of many Mexican presidents who have statues in the city. Aliyev
    "is our national hero, not Mexico's, and it's our right to recognize
    our national leader," Mukhtarov told me.

    Azerbaijan's most convincing argument is that a deal is a deal:
    It's not Azerbaijan's fault that Mexicans didn't pay attention to
    the statue until after it was built. During my meeting with him,
    Mukhtarov said that he would not accept any outcome other than the
    statue staying where it was, and if Mexico City were to remove the
    monument, the embassy would take the matter to an "international
    court." But since the statue was removed early Sunday morning, he
    seems to have softened his stance, telling the Russian press that he
    is working with the city to establish an Azerbaijani cultural center,
    which would be the new home of the statue. The fate of the Khojaly
    "genocide" memorial is still an open question.

    Today, Aliyev's monument sits in a warehouse in Mexico City's
    Department of Housing and Urban Development. A Web video of the
    statue's removal shows it being unloaded into a dirt yard, strewn
    with debris and stacks of bricks. It's an ignominious fate for the
    hero of a nation.

    31.01.13, 17:26

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