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REGNUM
September 23, 2007
Azerbaijan: `Non-free country', peace and war with peoples - interview
with Hayk Kotanjyan
REGNUM publishes an interview with the head of the
Armenian Defense Ministry Institute for National
Strategic Studies, Armenian Defense Minister's
councilor, Maj.-Gen. Hayk Kotanjyan. It has been
agreed to have a more free exchange of opinions, he
speaks as an independent expert with highest Russian
and US scientific qualification in conflict
ethnopolitology and national security political
theory.
REGNUM: Dr. Kotanjyan, how could you assess President
Aliyev's position regarding the Karabakh settlement?
For the security of Armenia and South Caucasian area,
one of the key problems is the one of settling the
Karabakh conflict with political democratic means.
While analyzing positions of the current Azerbaijani
leadership and first of all President Aliyev regarding
the Karabakh issue, one must take into account
international assessment of the level of democracy in
the nation led by him. An overall assessment of the
anti-democratic nature of the Aliyev regime is given
by the trustworthy US institution, Freedom House;
according to its latest report, today's Azerbaijan is
`not a free country.' Evidently, the democratization
process does not go on smoothly in its neighbors,
here, in Armenia as well as in Georgia, however, the
Freedom House considers the countries, despite the
`not free' Azerbaijan, as `partially free.'
As our Western colleagues note, the Azerbaijani
leader's position is anti-democratic in its core. This
is, first of all, shown in the anti-democratic
inheritance and maintenance of the oppressive rule as
well as in Aliyev Jr. totally imposing the Asian-style
cult of his father to the people of Azerbaijan. As for
the Karabakh settlement, position of the Azerbaijani
president reflects the colonialist essence of the
anti-democratic attitude of Baku regime towards rights
and freedoms of both the Nagorno Karabakh people and
his own population, particularly, ethnic minorities.
In this context, Baku's refusal to fulfill its
commitment to adopt the law `On national minorities'
undertaken while Azerbaijan was joining the Council of
Europe is symptomatic.
REGNUM: How is President Aliyev's anti-democratism
showing itself in the Karabakh settlement?
President Aliyev's anti-democratism in the Karabakh
settlement is seen in the following:
- first of all, in denying the fact of legal
democratic suspension of the administrative and
hierarchic relations between Nagorno Karabakh and
Azerbaijan as parts of the disintegrated USSR. The
matter concerns denial of the political and the
juridical fact of actualizing the right of the Nagorno
Karabakh people for self-determination through a
referendum held in Nagorno Karabakh in 1991, while the
USSR law `On procedure of settling issues related to
withdrawal of a Soviet republic from the USSR' before
the Alma-Ata Declaration on official announcement on
suspension of functioning of USSR governmental
agencies. It is worth mentioning that a possibility of
free expression of the Nagorno Karabakh people's will
via an additional referendum on democratic
self-determination as a face-saving compromise for the
Azerbaijani authorities, despite legitimacy of the
1991 referendum, under recommendation of the Minsk
Group co-chairs was considered at hearing of the
Armenian National Assembly as early as in 2005;
- second, in not recognizing the fact of Azerbaijani
aggression undertaken against the Nagorno Karabakh
Republic in 1991 after the NKR was established by
appropriate instruments of direct democracy as a
consequence of Baku authorities' denial of legitimacy
of establishing two states in the territory of the
Azerbaijani SSR during the collapse of the USSR;
- third, in violating fundamental UN principles:
global interdependency, progress and democracy in
relations with other nations based on the assumption
that lasting peace is a premise and democracy is
priority condition for secure and sustainable of
nations and the region in general. Ignoring those
principles, Aliyev has unleashed an arms race and
continually calls and mobilizes his population for
forceful returning of Karabakh. In connection with
reiterated revanchist calls by President Aliyev, the
international community is witness to undisclosed
political, military and moral psychological
preparation of the Azerbaijani Republic to a war
against the Republic of Armenia and the Nagorno
Karabakh Republic;
- fourth, in blocking and distorting under
governmental guidance of true information regarding
indigenes of Azerbaijan accompanied by falsification
of the history of the Armenian people and other
peoples in Eastern Transcaucasia in order to ground
territorial claims of the Aliyev regime for Artsakh
and justify rehearsal of the Azerbaijani aggression
against the legitimately self-determined Karabakh
Armenians.
REGNUM: You used to speak about antidemocratic nature
of Aliyev's regime towards ethnic minorities in
Azerbaijan. What is the gist of it?
The anti-democratic nature of the Aliyev regime is
shown not towards the Nagorno Karabakh Republic, but
at the domestic level as well. The ethnic
consciousness that appeared by some elites of
Azerbaijan's indigenous population after the collapse
of the Soviet Union has been trying o find an answer
to the really life-determining question: shall they
follow the way of full Turkization or promote
democracy in order to establish a mechanism of
federative cooperation between all nation-building
ethnic groups in control over Azerbaijani resources
preserving the ethnic and civilization diversity
brought through thousands years?
Forceful blocking of rights of ethnic minorities in
Azerbaijan makes their ethnic nationalism liberated
from the Soviet ideological taboos putting on the mask
of imposed from above tribal and regional forms of the
clannish inlay. In reality, under the disguise of
regional clans that preserved rudiments of
Central-Asian `Zhuz-style' control over territories of
nomads' camps traditional for Turk tribal
organization, there are transformed manifestations of
ethno-nationalism by indigenous peoples of Azerbaijan
more advanced in terms of their civilization level.
(The Zhuzes are tribal regional clans of Central-Asian
steppe Turks that continue to promote their clans by
tribal principle and privately influencing the system
of state control over ethnic resources. There are
`minor,' `medium,' and `senior' Zhuzes in Kazakhstan -
REGNUM).
The matter concerns ethno-national communities of
indigenous bilinguals, who being deprived of a
democratic choice in using another language in public
activity apart from the Azerbaijani-Turk one, in
family communication, most often remaining discreet,
use types of Persian (Talysh, Tat or Mountain Jews
languages) as well as Caucasian languages (Lezgin,
Avar, Tsakhur, Udin, Ingiloy, Kryz, Budug, Khynalyg
languages) and others. Such situation is typical even
for bilingual Kurds.
A symptomatic example of the Aliyev regime
non-democracy towards collective rights of ethnic
minorities that declared independence after collapse
of the Soviet Union was routing of Talysh Mugan
Autonomous Republic within Azerbaijan in 1993 by
Heydar Aliyev with arresting its leader Alikram
Gummatov and his ethno-political companions.
REGNUM: How would you assess freedom of ethnic and
political self-determination at personal level in the
context of the Freedom House report?
Aliyev regime's anti-democratic nature towards
non-Turk peoples of Azerbaijan is shown in restricting
their free ethnic self-expression not only at the
level of collective but of individual rights for free
democratic self-determination. The subject is quite
sensitive because of the policy established as early
as in the Soviet-time Azerbaijan of Turkization of
numerous ethnic minorities and absorbing their leaders
in the Azerbaijani-Turk elites. The policy has taken a
more complicated shape with nomination of KGB head
Heydar Aliyev to the post of the leader of the
Azerbaijani Communist Party in 1969. It was under his
rule, when children from a Talysh father and a Talysh
mother were registered as Azerbaijanis. The same thing
happened to many Tat, Lezgin, Avar and Mountain-Jews
families.
The purposeful policy towards Turkization of
indigenous people of Eastern Transcaucasia while
involving them into the history of Turks, who came to
South Caucasus, under the disguise of the proletarian
internationalism imitated for the Kremlin turned into
ethnic policy of the Azerbaijani Communist Party
Central Committee. It was carried out, first of all,
by secret preferences in social and professional
promotion of Tat, Talysh, Lezgin, Avar, Kurd
aboriginals, who publicly gave up identification of
their true ethnic origin. Quite often, apart from
Turks members of the ethnic minorities, who got into
the elites, also participated in managing this
process. By their own example of using preferences,
successful careers and wealth as a reward for their
renegade hyper-nationalism showed and are showing
profit of Azerbaijanization-Turkization to their not
yet Turkized compatriots.
REGNUM: Could you provide examples for your opinion?
The means of voluntary-coercive rejection of their
ethnic identity of their parents under discreet
pressure of the nation-building ethnic group in
Azerbaijan can with some reservations be compared to
the mechanism of personal voluntary-coercive
ethno-confessional self-determination of proponents of
other religions and ethnic groups `denme' that was
active in the Ottoman Turkey (under `denme' they in
Turkey meant first of all the process of Jews
converting from Judaism to Islam - REGNUM). The
mechanism secured returning of a `wayword' among
proponents of other religions and ethnic groups to the
`true roots' - Islam and the Ummah - under encouraging
surveillance of the state. It is worth mentioning, the
confessional aspect instead of the ethno-political one
in converting a proponent of another religion.
Further, following secularization of Turkey, the
mechanism of `denme' also secularized.
According to a number of sources, the well-known
founder of the new Turkey Kemal Ataturk is listed
among eminent Turks-"denme." His canonized political
biography describes his ancestors as Muslim Turks from
the Greek part of Macedonia, however, one of proofs of
his true ethnic and religious identity is still in the
Greek territory. In the territory of a former ghetto
in Thessaloniki, the house of his parents is still
there, which means that Ataturk was born in that
community.
There a lot of persons of Kurd, Talysh, Tat, Lezgin,
Avar, Jewish origin among Azerbaijani leaders,
particularly, in the military, political, financial
and economic, religious, scientific elites, who
self-identified them as Azerbaijani Turks under the
`denme' principal modified in the Azerbaijani way.
Azerbaijani leaders, self-identified as Azerbaijani
Turks, included a man, who was remembered by people of
his generation as a son of Kurd parents from the
village of Jomartly, Sisian District, Armenian SSR.
Political manipulations between the presidential
elections in Azerbaijan by this very fact were a cause
of scandalous reports in Baku press in 1998, including
the ones co-authored by former president Abulfaz
Elchibey. The scandal was put to an end by an action
at law against unmaskers of the true ethnic identity
of Heydar Aliyev.
Former Azerbaijani leaders Mirdzhafar Bagirov, Ayaz
Mutalibov are also known as `denme' from ethnic Tats.
The list of `denme' from the Lezgins constitutes a
substantial part of the Azerbaijani military
commandment and so on.
REGNUM: From the point of view of moral and ethnic
values and democratic principles, how is such ethnic
policy reflected in interpreting the history of the
Azerbaijani peoples?
As for protection or undermining moral and ethnic
values and democratic principles, such ethnic policy
in the Azerbaijani society is reflected by the Aliyev
regime blocking the human right for access to true
information. Falsification and censorship of
ethnically relevant information is carried out by the
government as both a way of pressing the media and
perverted ethnical political interpretation and
modification of the scientific history of Azerbaijani
peoples, deriving from contemporary time-serving
interests of the ruling regime. The problem could
become a subject of a separate study for a non-engaged
democratically-oriented part of Azerbaijani
researchers, who are concerned with the moral and
psychological well-being of the Azerbaijani nation and
ethnic minorities.
To cut it short, I can say that in some certain
instances we have to do with a tradition of political
encouragement of falsification of a personal story by
leading representatives of ethnic elites, including
social researchers, with rejection of inheriting
ethnic roots of the close ancestors, their parents:
the trend was shaped in depths of the Heydar Aliyev
regime. This ethno-political phenomenon of bringing
tergiversation to the ranks of Azerbaijan's state
policy as early as in the Soviet times psychologically
helps creating a morally pathological basis for
manipulating historical-cultural identities not only
of the parents, but of more distant ancestors as well.
In other words, the Azerbaijani state promoting the
cynicism of renegades overcoming the ethnic threshold
of their parents and ancestors' history lowers the
level of moral obligations regarding history if people
being far away in time and their ethnic kinship.
A sample of such personifying ethnic pathology is
Academician Ziy Buniyatov, who worked on the order of
the Communist Party and was not long ago killed in a
politicized mafia shootout. Being a son of a Talysh
father and a Molokan mother, he demonstratively
determined himself as an Azeri Turk. His moral choice
towards his ancestors was typical. Being Vice
President of the Azerbaijani Academy of Sciences in
charge for historical studies, he did not only took
effort for fundamental research and making public the
hushed-up history of the Talysh people sharing the
civilization achievements and fame of the ancient
Iran, but encouraged Turkization of the Talysh by his
tergiversation. It was proved by a comparative
historical linguistic analysis of Buniyatov's texts
that the falsifier founded his research and political
career of a courtier history quill driver not only on
ignoring the history of Talyshistan, but in cynical
distortion of ancient Armenian manuscripts and
fraudulent juggling by facts of history of indigenous
peoples in East Transcaucasia.
REGNUM: Last year, the Armenian Academy of Sciences,
in response to President Aliyev's report, warned about
danger of the scientific community becoming engaged in
re-writing the history of peoples in East
Transcaucasia. What are the dynamics of the process?
As early as last year, the Armenian National Academy
of Sciences warned about danger of engaging the
scientific community of Azerbaijan to time-serving
re-writing of the history of South Caucasus aimed at
political serving to interests of the despotic
ant-democratic state. The fact of total distortion and
oppression of the truthful information in Azerbaijan
is reflected in Freedom House assessments as a
significant signs of ant-democratic nature of the
regime in that not free country.
By the highest standards, the danger is that the
distortion personally led by the leader of the country
of facts regarding the relations of the Armenian and
Azerbaijani peoples is taking the shape of systematic
destruction of foundations for mutual trust. Both
modern and ancient history of the Armenian people
known by publications of respectable global scientific
theories are subjected to falsification. Meanwhile,
the `overturners' of the truths that were confirmed
long ago in order to undermine trust in any valid
sources in the Armenian history accuse in fraud not
only modern trustworthy schools, but generations of
historians and public figures, who have been working
in many countries in the process of thousand-year-long
relations with the Armenian people.
>From those very manipulative positions, the Aliyev
regime assigns to Armenians crimes against `the
Azerbaijani people' even in the periods, when the Turk
ancestors of current Azerbaijanis had not even
penetrated into South Caucasus from Central Asia.
Those vulgar distortions of the past are run through
by manipulation of the concepts of `Azerbaijan' and
`Azerbaijani' with their anti-scientific usage for the
periods that by many centuries forestalled usage
relating to Baku and Elisavetpol provinces in the
Russian Empire as late as since the beginning of the
20th century. At the same time, juggling with the
facts is used for Turk identification of the
population known as Turks, or Caucasus Tatars and
Indo-European and Caucasian peoples living in East
Transcaucasus long before intrusion of the hordes of
Turk invaders.
Thus, the Aliyev regime canonizes as the
Azerbaijani-Turk the whole generality of results of
activity of the thousand-year-long culture and
historical activity of Midian, Persian, Armenian, Tat,
Talysh, Lezgin, Avar, Udin peoples and others.
Aliyev's political order is trying to spoil the
centuries-long good neighborhood between Armenians and
offspring of their historical neighbors - ethnic
minorities of Azerbaijan - via vulgar transfer of
today's conflict relations between Armenians and
Azerbaijanis.
REGNUM: The Baku propaganda by words of President
Aliyev has been trying recently to impose the opinion
of Armenians as aliens in East Transcaucasia to the
Azerbaijani public. What is the campaign aimed at?
It is true, by being parasitic on the fact of
repatriation under results of the 1828 Russian-Persian
war of a limited number of Armenians ousted before to
Persia by Shakh Abbas, some of Baku researchers are
trying to impose upon the Azerbaijani public the idea
that all Armenians are strangers in East
Transcaucasia. Lately, the scientifically tailored
propaganda is being conducted by President Aliyev.
Such despotic violence against the human rights for
free access to truthful scientific information is
aimed at zombiing the Azerbaijani people by the belief
that Artsakh is allegedly a historic homeland of
Turks, and Armenians in Karabakh and Armenia are
mostly re-settlers or not Armenians at all. Members of
Baku, Gyandj and Shemakhin city elites note that the
lies is most frequently cultivated by newcomers of the
Aliyev establishment, Turks-"raionlu", offspring of
nomads that after arriving from remote places are
still adapting to the city order in the eyes of our
contemporaries.
History quill drivers by falsifying facts under direct
order by the Aliyev regime sometimes come up to
curious things, announcing that primitive artists of
the Gobustan prehistoric age were ancestors of the
Azerbaijani Turks. Although either in France or in
Spain a none of sober-minded researchers or
politicians cannot thinks of identifying petroglyphs
made by a Cro-Magnon man, probable contemporary of a
Gobustani primitive artist, as a belonging of the
French or Spanish culture.
The origins, including a work of 19th-century
historian of the Karabakh Khanate Mirza Adigezal-bek's
Karabag-name, demonstrate that nomads from the Turk
tribe of Saridjalli led by Panakh penetrated Artsakh
in the middle of the 18th century. Those Turks that
became settled in Artsakh ruled Karabakh as local
vassals governing on behalf of the Persian throne
within only 50 years. A gross number of Armenian and
foreign-language written documents as well as
thousands of historical architectural installations by
their symptomatic attributes identified by world
science as Armenian are evidence that within thousands
years Armenians were true masters of Artsakh that
covers, apart from Nagorno Karabakh, the territories
that are now included into the NKR security zone.
Azerbaijani falsifiers that ignore norms of scientific
ethics did not dare to call Albanian (which, as they
believe, means Azerbaijani-Turk) only Armenian
monuments in the so-called Armenian Vatican - the Holy
Echmiadzin that date back to start of propagating
Christianity in Armenia and Artsakh as well by
Apostles Bartholomew, Thaddeus and his follower Eglise
in the 1st century A.D. Deriving from this, the
Cristian community unanimously recognizes the Armenian
Church as one of few apostolic chirches in the world.
An evidence of this recognition is the fact that
relics of the Holy Apostles Enlighteners were granted
by the Vatican to the Holy Echmiadzin throne. However,
under Aliyev's order, politicos in science serving to
revanchism and territorial claims of the undemocratic
regime started denying this oracle.
REGNUM: What is the situation in Azerbaijan with
falsifications in the modern history?
Attempts of political `counterpoising' of the
20th-century genocide crimes against the Armenian
population and non-existent `genocide against
Azerbaijanis' thought out by historians under order of
the Aliyev regime can be cited as examples of gross
falsification in the modern history of East
Transcaucasia. On the basis of those falsifications,
under an initiative by Heydar Aliyev, a law on the
genocide against the Azerbaijanis was adopted in the
Azerbaijani Republic in 1998. Denial of the Armenian
Genocide is supplemented by provocative invitation to
Armenians to get involved into futile denial of the
absurd fabricated by the regime. The tragedy of the
Azerbaijani people not having free access to the
historical truth is based here on the fact that every
spring the Aliyev regime dupes them by engaging them
in official commemoration of the genocide that has
never taken place. Members of Baku intelligentsia are
mocking at this unfair and dangerous way of
consolidating the people. They know that in the
beginning of the 20th century, massacre of Armenians
took place and their resistance to the massacre, like
later it was in response to pogroms of the Armenian
population in Sumgait in 1988 and in Baku in 1990.
Together with the pseudo-scientific politicized
manipulations by the historical truth, the Aliyev
regime does not shun from special propaganda lies of
low quality being presented as scientific material.
The noisy recent campaign to commemorate victims of
the `genocide' allegedly organized by Armenians
against Mountain Jews serves to immoral political
tasks of knocking together Armenians and Jews.
Aliyev's manipulators brought the blasphemous
trampling of the historical truth to such a grade of
scoffing when mass graves of Armenians killed by gangs
of Caucasus Tatars in the beginning of the 20th
century are now presented by the media as `victims' of
the genocidal actions of the Armenians. Their goal is
to destroy the centuries-long good neighbor relations
between Shirvan Armenians and Mountain Jews hoping to
push Israel and Jewish lobby organizations to
anti-Armenian positions.
REGNUM: Some experts note that Azerbaijan's
information activity has come into the stage of
information war. Are there practical grounds for such
conclusions?
Unfortunately, it is reality. The Freedom House was
certainly negative about the internal aspect of the
Baku authorities' information policy. As for the
external component of the policy, the Aliyevs clan is
engaging the Azerbaijani public into the information
war against Armenia. In the range of such works
belonging to Baku information war promoted by the
Aliyev experts in propaganda under the pretext of
protecting human rights, the fact of falsifying
authorship of outrage against bodies of victims in the
Khodjaly tragedy deserves special attention. Details
of this provocation as a dirty tool in the fight for
power in Baku were given close in the tracks by
Azerbaijani President Ayaz Mutalibov to Czech reporter
Dana Mazalova in April 1992. The Armenian side has all
evidence that bodies of the victims were in the
Azerbaijani authorities' responsibility zone and
physical contact of Armenians with the bodies in order
to abuse them was impossible.
REGNUM: What prospects of free democratic
self-determination do you see for indigenous peoples
as autonomous subjects inside Azerbaijan?
The persistent purposeful deformation of ethnic and
cultural identity of indigenous peoples in East
Transcaucasia by the Aliyev regime taking place now is
aimed at monopolizing power due to ethnic
homogenization of the population and manipulation by
clan mechanisms of the despotic Unitarianism in the
long run. Thus, the Baku regime's forceful pressure
blocks ethnic and political resources of safe and
sustainable development of Azerbaijan not through the
despotic way, but through the way of democratic
federalization of the governance. Ways of transforming
those ethnic resources from oppressed by the regime,
Medieval in their essence clan and tribal forms into
modern state-building political processes and
institutions needs to be thought over by elites of
those Azerbaijani peoples.
REGNUM: In case of a hypothetical democratic
federalization of Azerbaijan, what indigenous ethnic
groups, do you think, could hope for their
self-determination in autonomy?
Of course, if we ground upon human rights and freedoms
recognized by progressive circles in the international
communities, all of them could. However, to resolve
such tasks presence of the appropriate democratic
political and legal culture, including political
freedoms formulated as constitutional or legal acts,
as a premise for legitimate expression of their will
is expected to be in a poly-ethnic society. With such
reservations, in the process of democratic
federalization of Azerbaijan, to my mind, most
numerous indigenous peoples could claim for autonomy,
ethnic groups that traditionally within thousands of
years have been playing a significant role in the
fates of East Transcaucasia, first of all,
Persian-speaking Tats, Mountain Jews and Talysh people
and Caucasian-language Lezgins and Avars.
September 23, 2007
Azerbaijan: `Non-free country', peace and war with peoples - interview
with Hayk Kotanjyan
REGNUM publishes an interview with the head of the
Armenian Defense Ministry Institute for National
Strategic Studies, Armenian Defense Minister's
councilor, Maj.-Gen. Hayk Kotanjyan. It has been
agreed to have a more free exchange of opinions, he
speaks as an independent expert with highest Russian
and US scientific qualification in conflict
ethnopolitology and national security political
theory.
REGNUM: Dr. Kotanjyan, how could you assess President
Aliyev's position regarding the Karabakh settlement?
For the security of Armenia and South Caucasian area,
one of the key problems is the one of settling the
Karabakh conflict with political democratic means.
While analyzing positions of the current Azerbaijani
leadership and first of all President Aliyev regarding
the Karabakh issue, one must take into account
international assessment of the level of democracy in
the nation led by him. An overall assessment of the
anti-democratic nature of the Aliyev regime is given
by the trustworthy US institution, Freedom House;
according to its latest report, today's Azerbaijan is
`not a free country.' Evidently, the democratization
process does not go on smoothly in its neighbors,
here, in Armenia as well as in Georgia, however, the
Freedom House considers the countries, despite the
`not free' Azerbaijan, as `partially free.'
As our Western colleagues note, the Azerbaijani
leader's position is anti-democratic in its core. This
is, first of all, shown in the anti-democratic
inheritance and maintenance of the oppressive rule as
well as in Aliyev Jr. totally imposing the Asian-style
cult of his father to the people of Azerbaijan. As for
the Karabakh settlement, position of the Azerbaijani
president reflects the colonialist essence of the
anti-democratic attitude of Baku regime towards rights
and freedoms of both the Nagorno Karabakh people and
his own population, particularly, ethnic minorities.
In this context, Baku's refusal to fulfill its
commitment to adopt the law `On national minorities'
undertaken while Azerbaijan was joining the Council of
Europe is symptomatic.
REGNUM: How is President Aliyev's anti-democratism
showing itself in the Karabakh settlement?
President Aliyev's anti-democratism in the Karabakh
settlement is seen in the following:
- first of all, in denying the fact of legal
democratic suspension of the administrative and
hierarchic relations between Nagorno Karabakh and
Azerbaijan as parts of the disintegrated USSR. The
matter concerns denial of the political and the
juridical fact of actualizing the right of the Nagorno
Karabakh people for self-determination through a
referendum held in Nagorno Karabakh in 1991, while the
USSR law `On procedure of settling issues related to
withdrawal of a Soviet republic from the USSR' before
the Alma-Ata Declaration on official announcement on
suspension of functioning of USSR governmental
agencies. It is worth mentioning that a possibility of
free expression of the Nagorno Karabakh people's will
via an additional referendum on democratic
self-determination as a face-saving compromise for the
Azerbaijani authorities, despite legitimacy of the
1991 referendum, under recommendation of the Minsk
Group co-chairs was considered at hearing of the
Armenian National Assembly as early as in 2005;
- second, in not recognizing the fact of Azerbaijani
aggression undertaken against the Nagorno Karabakh
Republic in 1991 after the NKR was established by
appropriate instruments of direct democracy as a
consequence of Baku authorities' denial of legitimacy
of establishing two states in the territory of the
Azerbaijani SSR during the collapse of the USSR;
- third, in violating fundamental UN principles:
global interdependency, progress and democracy in
relations with other nations based on the assumption
that lasting peace is a premise and democracy is
priority condition for secure and sustainable of
nations and the region in general. Ignoring those
principles, Aliyev has unleashed an arms race and
continually calls and mobilizes his population for
forceful returning of Karabakh. In connection with
reiterated revanchist calls by President Aliyev, the
international community is witness to undisclosed
political, military and moral psychological
preparation of the Azerbaijani Republic to a war
against the Republic of Armenia and the Nagorno
Karabakh Republic;
- fourth, in blocking and distorting under
governmental guidance of true information regarding
indigenes of Azerbaijan accompanied by falsification
of the history of the Armenian people and other
peoples in Eastern Transcaucasia in order to ground
territorial claims of the Aliyev regime for Artsakh
and justify rehearsal of the Azerbaijani aggression
against the legitimately self-determined Karabakh
Armenians.
REGNUM: You used to speak about antidemocratic nature
of Aliyev's regime towards ethnic minorities in
Azerbaijan. What is the gist of it?
The anti-democratic nature of the Aliyev regime is
shown not towards the Nagorno Karabakh Republic, but
at the domestic level as well. The ethnic
consciousness that appeared by some elites of
Azerbaijan's indigenous population after the collapse
of the Soviet Union has been trying o find an answer
to the really life-determining question: shall they
follow the way of full Turkization or promote
democracy in order to establish a mechanism of
federative cooperation between all nation-building
ethnic groups in control over Azerbaijani resources
preserving the ethnic and civilization diversity
brought through thousands years?
Forceful blocking of rights of ethnic minorities in
Azerbaijan makes their ethnic nationalism liberated
from the Soviet ideological taboos putting on the mask
of imposed from above tribal and regional forms of the
clannish inlay. In reality, under the disguise of
regional clans that preserved rudiments of
Central-Asian `Zhuz-style' control over territories of
nomads' camps traditional for Turk tribal
organization, there are transformed manifestations of
ethno-nationalism by indigenous peoples of Azerbaijan
more advanced in terms of their civilization level.
(The Zhuzes are tribal regional clans of Central-Asian
steppe Turks that continue to promote their clans by
tribal principle and privately influencing the system
of state control over ethnic resources. There are
`minor,' `medium,' and `senior' Zhuzes in Kazakhstan -
REGNUM).
The matter concerns ethno-national communities of
indigenous bilinguals, who being deprived of a
democratic choice in using another language in public
activity apart from the Azerbaijani-Turk one, in
family communication, most often remaining discreet,
use types of Persian (Talysh, Tat or Mountain Jews
languages) as well as Caucasian languages (Lezgin,
Avar, Tsakhur, Udin, Ingiloy, Kryz, Budug, Khynalyg
languages) and others. Such situation is typical even
for bilingual Kurds.
A symptomatic example of the Aliyev regime
non-democracy towards collective rights of ethnic
minorities that declared independence after collapse
of the Soviet Union was routing of Talysh Mugan
Autonomous Republic within Azerbaijan in 1993 by
Heydar Aliyev with arresting its leader Alikram
Gummatov and his ethno-political companions.
REGNUM: How would you assess freedom of ethnic and
political self-determination at personal level in the
context of the Freedom House report?
Aliyev regime's anti-democratic nature towards
non-Turk peoples of Azerbaijan is shown in restricting
their free ethnic self-expression not only at the
level of collective but of individual rights for free
democratic self-determination. The subject is quite
sensitive because of the policy established as early
as in the Soviet-time Azerbaijan of Turkization of
numerous ethnic minorities and absorbing their leaders
in the Azerbaijani-Turk elites. The policy has taken a
more complicated shape with nomination of KGB head
Heydar Aliyev to the post of the leader of the
Azerbaijani Communist Party in 1969. It was under his
rule, when children from a Talysh father and a Talysh
mother were registered as Azerbaijanis. The same thing
happened to many Tat, Lezgin, Avar and Mountain-Jews
families.
The purposeful policy towards Turkization of
indigenous people of Eastern Transcaucasia while
involving them into the history of Turks, who came to
South Caucasus, under the disguise of the proletarian
internationalism imitated for the Kremlin turned into
ethnic policy of the Azerbaijani Communist Party
Central Committee. It was carried out, first of all,
by secret preferences in social and professional
promotion of Tat, Talysh, Lezgin, Avar, Kurd
aboriginals, who publicly gave up identification of
their true ethnic origin. Quite often, apart from
Turks members of the ethnic minorities, who got into
the elites, also participated in managing this
process. By their own example of using preferences,
successful careers and wealth as a reward for their
renegade hyper-nationalism showed and are showing
profit of Azerbaijanization-Turkization to their not
yet Turkized compatriots.
REGNUM: Could you provide examples for your opinion?
The means of voluntary-coercive rejection of their
ethnic identity of their parents under discreet
pressure of the nation-building ethnic group in
Azerbaijan can with some reservations be compared to
the mechanism of personal voluntary-coercive
ethno-confessional self-determination of proponents of
other religions and ethnic groups `denme' that was
active in the Ottoman Turkey (under `denme' they in
Turkey meant first of all the process of Jews
converting from Judaism to Islam - REGNUM). The
mechanism secured returning of a `wayword' among
proponents of other religions and ethnic groups to the
`true roots' - Islam and the Ummah - under encouraging
surveillance of the state. It is worth mentioning, the
confessional aspect instead of the ethno-political one
in converting a proponent of another religion.
Further, following secularization of Turkey, the
mechanism of `denme' also secularized.
According to a number of sources, the well-known
founder of the new Turkey Kemal Ataturk is listed
among eminent Turks-"denme." His canonized political
biography describes his ancestors as Muslim Turks from
the Greek part of Macedonia, however, one of proofs of
his true ethnic and religious identity is still in the
Greek territory. In the territory of a former ghetto
in Thessaloniki, the house of his parents is still
there, which means that Ataturk was born in that
community.
There a lot of persons of Kurd, Talysh, Tat, Lezgin,
Avar, Jewish origin among Azerbaijani leaders,
particularly, in the military, political, financial
and economic, religious, scientific elites, who
self-identified them as Azerbaijani Turks under the
`denme' principal modified in the Azerbaijani way.
Azerbaijani leaders, self-identified as Azerbaijani
Turks, included a man, who was remembered by people of
his generation as a son of Kurd parents from the
village of Jomartly, Sisian District, Armenian SSR.
Political manipulations between the presidential
elections in Azerbaijan by this very fact were a cause
of scandalous reports in Baku press in 1998, including
the ones co-authored by former president Abulfaz
Elchibey. The scandal was put to an end by an action
at law against unmaskers of the true ethnic identity
of Heydar Aliyev.
Former Azerbaijani leaders Mirdzhafar Bagirov, Ayaz
Mutalibov are also known as `denme' from ethnic Tats.
The list of `denme' from the Lezgins constitutes a
substantial part of the Azerbaijani military
commandment and so on.
REGNUM: From the point of view of moral and ethnic
values and democratic principles, how is such ethnic
policy reflected in interpreting the history of the
Azerbaijani peoples?
As for protection or undermining moral and ethnic
values and democratic principles, such ethnic policy
in the Azerbaijani society is reflected by the Aliyev
regime blocking the human right for access to true
information. Falsification and censorship of
ethnically relevant information is carried out by the
government as both a way of pressing the media and
perverted ethnical political interpretation and
modification of the scientific history of Azerbaijani
peoples, deriving from contemporary time-serving
interests of the ruling regime. The problem could
become a subject of a separate study for a non-engaged
democratically-oriented part of Azerbaijani
researchers, who are concerned with the moral and
psychological well-being of the Azerbaijani nation and
ethnic minorities.
To cut it short, I can say that in some certain
instances we have to do with a tradition of political
encouragement of falsification of a personal story by
leading representatives of ethnic elites, including
social researchers, with rejection of inheriting
ethnic roots of the close ancestors, their parents:
the trend was shaped in depths of the Heydar Aliyev
regime. This ethno-political phenomenon of bringing
tergiversation to the ranks of Azerbaijan's state
policy as early as in the Soviet times psychologically
helps creating a morally pathological basis for
manipulating historical-cultural identities not only
of the parents, but of more distant ancestors as well.
In other words, the Azerbaijani state promoting the
cynicism of renegades overcoming the ethnic threshold
of their parents and ancestors' history lowers the
level of moral obligations regarding history if people
being far away in time and their ethnic kinship.
A sample of such personifying ethnic pathology is
Academician Ziy Buniyatov, who worked on the order of
the Communist Party and was not long ago killed in a
politicized mafia shootout. Being a son of a Talysh
father and a Molokan mother, he demonstratively
determined himself as an Azeri Turk. His moral choice
towards his ancestors was typical. Being Vice
President of the Azerbaijani Academy of Sciences in
charge for historical studies, he did not only took
effort for fundamental research and making public the
hushed-up history of the Talysh people sharing the
civilization achievements and fame of the ancient
Iran, but encouraged Turkization of the Talysh by his
tergiversation. It was proved by a comparative
historical linguistic analysis of Buniyatov's texts
that the falsifier founded his research and political
career of a courtier history quill driver not only on
ignoring the history of Talyshistan, but in cynical
distortion of ancient Armenian manuscripts and
fraudulent juggling by facts of history of indigenous
peoples in East Transcaucasia.
REGNUM: Last year, the Armenian Academy of Sciences,
in response to President Aliyev's report, warned about
danger of the scientific community becoming engaged in
re-writing the history of peoples in East
Transcaucasia. What are the dynamics of the process?
As early as last year, the Armenian National Academy
of Sciences warned about danger of engaging the
scientific community of Azerbaijan to time-serving
re-writing of the history of South Caucasus aimed at
political serving to interests of the despotic
ant-democratic state. The fact of total distortion and
oppression of the truthful information in Azerbaijan
is reflected in Freedom House assessments as a
significant signs of ant-democratic nature of the
regime in that not free country.
By the highest standards, the danger is that the
distortion personally led by the leader of the country
of facts regarding the relations of the Armenian and
Azerbaijani peoples is taking the shape of systematic
destruction of foundations for mutual trust. Both
modern and ancient history of the Armenian people
known by publications of respectable global scientific
theories are subjected to falsification. Meanwhile,
the `overturners' of the truths that were confirmed
long ago in order to undermine trust in any valid
sources in the Armenian history accuse in fraud not
only modern trustworthy schools, but generations of
historians and public figures, who have been working
in many countries in the process of thousand-year-long
relations with the Armenian people.
>From those very manipulative positions, the Aliyev
regime assigns to Armenians crimes against `the
Azerbaijani people' even in the periods, when the Turk
ancestors of current Azerbaijanis had not even
penetrated into South Caucasus from Central Asia.
Those vulgar distortions of the past are run through
by manipulation of the concepts of `Azerbaijan' and
`Azerbaijani' with their anti-scientific usage for the
periods that by many centuries forestalled usage
relating to Baku and Elisavetpol provinces in the
Russian Empire as late as since the beginning of the
20th century. At the same time, juggling with the
facts is used for Turk identification of the
population known as Turks, or Caucasus Tatars and
Indo-European and Caucasian peoples living in East
Transcaucasus long before intrusion of the hordes of
Turk invaders.
Thus, the Aliyev regime canonizes as the
Azerbaijani-Turk the whole generality of results of
activity of the thousand-year-long culture and
historical activity of Midian, Persian, Armenian, Tat,
Talysh, Lezgin, Avar, Udin peoples and others.
Aliyev's political order is trying to spoil the
centuries-long good neighborhood between Armenians and
offspring of their historical neighbors - ethnic
minorities of Azerbaijan - via vulgar transfer of
today's conflict relations between Armenians and
Azerbaijanis.
REGNUM: The Baku propaganda by words of President
Aliyev has been trying recently to impose the opinion
of Armenians as aliens in East Transcaucasia to the
Azerbaijani public. What is the campaign aimed at?
It is true, by being parasitic on the fact of
repatriation under results of the 1828 Russian-Persian
war of a limited number of Armenians ousted before to
Persia by Shakh Abbas, some of Baku researchers are
trying to impose upon the Azerbaijani public the idea
that all Armenians are strangers in East
Transcaucasia. Lately, the scientifically tailored
propaganda is being conducted by President Aliyev.
Such despotic violence against the human rights for
free access to truthful scientific information is
aimed at zombiing the Azerbaijani people by the belief
that Artsakh is allegedly a historic homeland of
Turks, and Armenians in Karabakh and Armenia are
mostly re-settlers or not Armenians at all. Members of
Baku, Gyandj and Shemakhin city elites note that the
lies is most frequently cultivated by newcomers of the
Aliyev establishment, Turks-"raionlu", offspring of
nomads that after arriving from remote places are
still adapting to the city order in the eyes of our
contemporaries.
History quill drivers by falsifying facts under direct
order by the Aliyev regime sometimes come up to
curious things, announcing that primitive artists of
the Gobustan prehistoric age were ancestors of the
Azerbaijani Turks. Although either in France or in
Spain a none of sober-minded researchers or
politicians cannot thinks of identifying petroglyphs
made by a Cro-Magnon man, probable contemporary of a
Gobustani primitive artist, as a belonging of the
French or Spanish culture.
The origins, including a work of 19th-century
historian of the Karabakh Khanate Mirza Adigezal-bek's
Karabag-name, demonstrate that nomads from the Turk
tribe of Saridjalli led by Panakh penetrated Artsakh
in the middle of the 18th century. Those Turks that
became settled in Artsakh ruled Karabakh as local
vassals governing on behalf of the Persian throne
within only 50 years. A gross number of Armenian and
foreign-language written documents as well as
thousands of historical architectural installations by
their symptomatic attributes identified by world
science as Armenian are evidence that within thousands
years Armenians were true masters of Artsakh that
covers, apart from Nagorno Karabakh, the territories
that are now included into the NKR security zone.
Azerbaijani falsifiers that ignore norms of scientific
ethics did not dare to call Albanian (which, as they
believe, means Azerbaijani-Turk) only Armenian
monuments in the so-called Armenian Vatican - the Holy
Echmiadzin that date back to start of propagating
Christianity in Armenia and Artsakh as well by
Apostles Bartholomew, Thaddeus and his follower Eglise
in the 1st century A.D. Deriving from this, the
Cristian community unanimously recognizes the Armenian
Church as one of few apostolic chirches in the world.
An evidence of this recognition is the fact that
relics of the Holy Apostles Enlighteners were granted
by the Vatican to the Holy Echmiadzin throne. However,
under Aliyev's order, politicos in science serving to
revanchism and territorial claims of the undemocratic
regime started denying this oracle.
REGNUM: What is the situation in Azerbaijan with
falsifications in the modern history?
Attempts of political `counterpoising' of the
20th-century genocide crimes against the Armenian
population and non-existent `genocide against
Azerbaijanis' thought out by historians under order of
the Aliyev regime can be cited as examples of gross
falsification in the modern history of East
Transcaucasia. On the basis of those falsifications,
under an initiative by Heydar Aliyev, a law on the
genocide against the Azerbaijanis was adopted in the
Azerbaijani Republic in 1998. Denial of the Armenian
Genocide is supplemented by provocative invitation to
Armenians to get involved into futile denial of the
absurd fabricated by the regime. The tragedy of the
Azerbaijani people not having free access to the
historical truth is based here on the fact that every
spring the Aliyev regime dupes them by engaging them
in official commemoration of the genocide that has
never taken place. Members of Baku intelligentsia are
mocking at this unfair and dangerous way of
consolidating the people. They know that in the
beginning of the 20th century, massacre of Armenians
took place and their resistance to the massacre, like
later it was in response to pogroms of the Armenian
population in Sumgait in 1988 and in Baku in 1990.
Together with the pseudo-scientific politicized
manipulations by the historical truth, the Aliyev
regime does not shun from special propaganda lies of
low quality being presented as scientific material.
The noisy recent campaign to commemorate victims of
the `genocide' allegedly organized by Armenians
against Mountain Jews serves to immoral political
tasks of knocking together Armenians and Jews.
Aliyev's manipulators brought the blasphemous
trampling of the historical truth to such a grade of
scoffing when mass graves of Armenians killed by gangs
of Caucasus Tatars in the beginning of the 20th
century are now presented by the media as `victims' of
the genocidal actions of the Armenians. Their goal is
to destroy the centuries-long good neighbor relations
between Shirvan Armenians and Mountain Jews hoping to
push Israel and Jewish lobby organizations to
anti-Armenian positions.
REGNUM: Some experts note that Azerbaijan's
information activity has come into the stage of
information war. Are there practical grounds for such
conclusions?
Unfortunately, it is reality. The Freedom House was
certainly negative about the internal aspect of the
Baku authorities' information policy. As for the
external component of the policy, the Aliyevs clan is
engaging the Azerbaijani public into the information
war against Armenia. In the range of such works
belonging to Baku information war promoted by the
Aliyev experts in propaganda under the pretext of
protecting human rights, the fact of falsifying
authorship of outrage against bodies of victims in the
Khodjaly tragedy deserves special attention. Details
of this provocation as a dirty tool in the fight for
power in Baku were given close in the tracks by
Azerbaijani President Ayaz Mutalibov to Czech reporter
Dana Mazalova in April 1992. The Armenian side has all
evidence that bodies of the victims were in the
Azerbaijani authorities' responsibility zone and
physical contact of Armenians with the bodies in order
to abuse them was impossible.
REGNUM: What prospects of free democratic
self-determination do you see for indigenous peoples
as autonomous subjects inside Azerbaijan?
The persistent purposeful deformation of ethnic and
cultural identity of indigenous peoples in East
Transcaucasia by the Aliyev regime taking place now is
aimed at monopolizing power due to ethnic
homogenization of the population and manipulation by
clan mechanisms of the despotic Unitarianism in the
long run. Thus, the Baku regime's forceful pressure
blocks ethnic and political resources of safe and
sustainable development of Azerbaijan not through the
despotic way, but through the way of democratic
federalization of the governance. Ways of transforming
those ethnic resources from oppressed by the regime,
Medieval in their essence clan and tribal forms into
modern state-building political processes and
institutions needs to be thought over by elites of
those Azerbaijani peoples.
REGNUM: In case of a hypothetical democratic
federalization of Azerbaijan, what indigenous ethnic
groups, do you think, could hope for their
self-determination in autonomy?
Of course, if we ground upon human rights and freedoms
recognized by progressive circles in the international
communities, all of them could. However, to resolve
such tasks presence of the appropriate democratic
political and legal culture, including political
freedoms formulated as constitutional or legal acts,
as a premise for legitimate expression of their will
is expected to be in a poly-ethnic society. With such
reservations, in the process of democratic
federalization of Azerbaijan, to my mind, most
numerous indigenous peoples could claim for autonomy,
ethnic groups that traditionally within thousands of
years have been playing a significant role in the
fates of East Transcaucasia, first of all,
Persian-speaking Tats, Mountain Jews and Talysh people
and Caucasian-language Lezgins and Avars.