Armenophobia in Azerbaijan

Tortures

Shoes made of umbilical skin: Armenians removed the skin of captive Azerbaijanis and even invented a special device for this process.

The right eye goes first: Armenians first put out the right eye of a captive Azerbaijani man. <…> To start with, they thrust a red-hot piece of wire into the right eye or plucked it out with a knife.

Torture with vipers: First Zhora dropped the captive, with his hands and feet tied, into a pit swarming with snakes whose fangs had been pulled out. After seeing enough of this, Zhora would let in fully-fanged snakes to attack the captive.

Tortures using horseshoes, nails, knives and axes: They killed hundreds of thousands Azerbaijani citizens using this torture. In their workshops, Armenian blacksmiths made many horseshoes and nails for the sons of Azerbaijan. Tortures of Azerbaijanis by Armenians using axes were even more appalling. Great number of bodies was found hacked into pieces like firewood. They plunged and twisted knives into the flesh of Azerbaijanis.

Tortures using salt: <…> Many of the dead had their eye sockets filled with salt. Many were flayed, with their raw flesh salted. <…> Large amounts of salted water were injected into their intestines.

Tortures using a pair of tongs: <…> they tore the lips of Azerbaijanis into a bloody mess and pulled out their golden tooth crowns. There were also many cases when chunks of the living flesh were torn out with a pair of tongs. <…> They say that an Armenian who had lost his eye during the war was transplanted the eye of a good-looking Azerbaijani man.

A book entitled Hale has a story named “The Gorge of Abandoned Stones” giving the following blood-curdling account: They had no mercy not only for women, old people and children, but did not spare disabled and mentally ill persons who had been confined to their beds for years. Good-natured and peaceful Gheychi Turks who held nothing in their arms except for saz, fell victims to armed to the teeth Dashnaks. A famous musician, ashugh Najaf, suffered special tortures at the hands of Dashnaks: they attached a boiling samovar to his chest and made him walk around the villages until his flesh was scalded through from the hot steam.

Later, this scene was perpetuated by an Azerbaijani artist Vagif Ujatay.

A one-man exhibition named ‘Behold, See and Don’t Forget!’ by the artist Vagif Ujatay was held in Baku and was dedicated to the “deeds of Armenian fascists”. “<…> In 1992, the Armenian fascists in the village of Baganis Ayrum of Ghazakh region skewered a 2-month-old infant on a ramrod and after roasting the body, offered the mother to eat it”. <…> The pinnacle of the exhibition was another work depicting another “appalling atrocity perpetrated by Armenians”: “In 1988, in the Armenian region of Gugark, the Armenian beasts filled tubes with 80 children. As they did so, 79 of them were still alive, and the 80th, who wouldn’t fit inside was torn into pieces. This enormity was later unveiled by foreigners; the bodies were found by specially trained French dogs. Ever since Armenians unleashed this nightmare, such works have become the core of my artistic activity,” said the artist.

“Armenians infect, eat and torture Azerbaijanis”

“Cannibal Karine” <…> They brought this woman named Karine to the prison of Shushi where they kept the Azerbaijani prisoners of war. <…> She was a cannibal; she liked to eat human flesh, quite often the living flesh. She yanked chunks of flesh from bone with her teeth chewing, swallowing and feasting on human blood. They brought her to the prison where she visually chose her “living foodstuff”. <…>

“HIV-positive Anzhela Petrosyan in Baku” <…> Armenia is now waging neither cold, nor information, but a biological war. <…> Angela Petrosyan contracted AIDS <…>. She started deliberately infecting Azerbaijani residents of Baku with AIDS. She received her instructions and acted strictly according to the plan…

“Armenians are behind female sterility across CIS countries” The so-called “Armenian vaccine”, Gardasil and Cervarix, developed by an Armenian physician in the United States, has been freely imported and distributed at no charge since 2009 in Russia, Ukraine, Kazakhstan, Azerbaijan and in other CIS countries.

“Armenians organize terrorist acts”. Fortunately, sometimes the Azerbaijanis themselves reveal disinformation and refute it.

Armenian trail in the terror act at the State Oil Academy of Baku on April 30, 2009. The indictment handed down by A. Yusifov said that the person who masterminded the mass shooting in the Oil Academy was Martin Grigoryevich Gumashyan, born in 1951, who lives with his spouse and sons in the village of Shulaver of Marneuli District of Georgia. M. Gumashyan and his sons are engaged in baking bread in the bakery built in the courtyard of their own house. The document also notes that in January-March 2009, Gumashyan entered into a criminal conspiracy with a resident of Dashtepe village of Marneuli District Farda Asad oglu Gadirov, his relative from the village of Shulaver Javidan Farman oglu Amirov and residents of Dashtepe village Najaf Novruz oglu Suleymanov, Nadir Shirkhan oglu Aliyev and other citizens, whose identity has not been established yet by the investigation, agreed to commit a terrorist act in the city of Baku against Azerbaijanis out of ethnic hatred. He promised to allot a sum of 50 thousand USD for the organization and execution of this crime and gave Farda Gadirov the initial sum of 5 thousand USD, with the outstanding sum to be paid after the terrorist act would be committed.

The correspondent of the Azerbaijani newspaper Yeni Musavat traveled to the village of Shulaver and without any help from Interpol found the Armenian Gumashyan in the courtyard of his own house and recorded an interview with him that upset the course of the trial on the shooting of students at the State Oil Academy of Azerbaijan.

It transpired that Martun Gumashyan was not even acquainted with Farda Gadirov who was the perpetrator of the bloodbath at the Oil Academy. Moreover, as soon as Gumashyan found out that the authorities of Azerbaijan declared him a “terrorist”, he turned to the Georgian General Prosecutor’s Office and the Ministry of Internal Affairs, where he was told that the Azerbaijani side had taken no action to seek his arrest.

The newspaper Zerkalo turned to the law enforcement authorities of Azerbaijan for clarification of the situation at hand. “We have turned to the Ministry of Internal Affairs of Georgia. The Ministry’s officer on duty, Dmitri Botsulava stated to our correspondent that the Ministry received no motions concerning Martun Gumashyan. This means that the statements made by Gumashyan were truthful”, writes Zerkalo.

“We have also turned to the Azerbaijani Office of Interpol as it was the organization which, according to the statement of the General Prosecutor’s Office, handled the search for Martun Gumashyan. We decided to inquire about the progress of a search for a person who had never thought of going into hiding and continued to live in his own house. The officer on duty, Hasanov suggested that we leave our telephone number, but the senior officials of Interpol never called back. Then, we called again. The organization’s officer suggested that we turned with our questions to the press service of the Ministry of Internal Affairs. We did as suggested. The officer of the Ministry’s press service, Ehsan Zahidov, stated to Zerkalo that he had no information concerning the search for Martun Gumashyan”, continues the newspaper.

“We have also turned to the General Prosecutor’s Office of Azerbaijan. The head of its press-service stated that necessary actions would be taken to arrest Martun Gumashyan in the future! He also noted that the law-enforcement authorities of Azerbaijan would establish the identities of all involved in the tragedy and would call them to account”.

Interestingly, after a while, the columnist of the newspaper Yeni Musavat, Tofig Yagublu, who had prepared the sensational report was arrested on trumped-up charges.

Shocking is one of the centerpieces in demonizing an image. This method has been widely employed in shaping the image of an Armenian in documentary materials, social and political discourse, art and propaganda of today’s Azerbaijan.

A generation of children has grown up in Azerbaijan who have never seen Armenians, but form their judgment on hearsay. Targeting this group is the easiest task as there is no need to shatter the existing stereotypes based on knowledge, personal familiarity or own views. They not only fail to challenge such information, but re-circulate it reinforced with claims of personal involvement or somebody they know well.

A dialog between two young Azerbaijanis on a forum:

– Although our parents lived and were friends with them, they conspired against us behind our backs just the same. <…> Even if they do music, they can teach their Armenian ideology.

– And not only ideology. You might have seen it on the TV; one Armenian woman, who was a midwife in a maternity hospital, squeezed the testicles of new-born boys long before the Armenian-Azerbaijani events.

11. Anti-Armenian paranoia

Paranoia is a variety of a thinking disorder. People who suffer from paranoia have exasperated distrust of people around them, susceptibility to offense, suspiciousness, jealousy, tendency to see conspiring ill-wishers in random occurrences, inability to forget and forgive grievances or to handle criticism. They may conceive obsessive ideas leading a paranoid person to develop intricate and logically coherent conspiracy theories against him/her.

Individual incidents of paranoia are easily diagnosed, as the paranoid person is surrounded by people with healthy perception of the reality.

Collective paranoia is quite a different matter. Even the clear-headed, if any, must feign to share the collective delusion. In rare cases, they attempt to stand up for their cognizance of the reality and become targets to persecution and ostracism from those around them.

Apart from this, Azerbaijan relentlessly bans any positive mention or depiction of Armenians, with domestic information space bursting with pieces of information which, as we have seen above, are not only far from the reality, but are both fantastic and inconceivable. Any negative occurrence – from natural phenomena to socio-economic problems – are attributed to the insidious hand of Armenians or envious evil-wishers sponsored by Armenians.

Frequently, such paranoia takes preposterous forms. In this sense, any goods made in Armenia or by ethnic Armenians get a special treatment and are prohibited. A huge hullabaloo is raised over any commodity accidentally landing on the shelves of Azerbaijani shops.

At the outset of this strife, before the alleged reasons and motives became attuned to the ideology and logic, the most absurd reasons were brought up to justify the ban and destruction of any such merchandise. For example, this was the case with the Armenian brandy and coffee which were seized and destroyed.

The Azerbaijani website Azeritоdаy.соm: The State Customs Committee of Azerbaijan, in the framework of its No Smuggling campaign, discovered in the distribution network of Baku expired coffee and brandy produced in Armenia. The goods so discovered were destroyed in the presence of journalists. As reported by Aziz Majidov, Sector Head of State Customs Committee, the expert appraisal declared the destroyed merchandise unfit for use.

Later, after bringing the set of categories into alignment with the official propaganda to furnish more or less logical rationale, the presence of the Armenian merchandise came to be portrayed as a manifestation of terrorism deliberately targeting the population of Azerbaijan. It must be noted that frequently, such information is either not true or intentionally distorted to further aggravate the situation.

The Azerbaijani website Bia.az: “In Azerbaijan, law enforcement authorities started a verification procedure in respect of a pediatrician who had advised his patients to use Nutrilаc infant formula

produced by the Russian company Nitritek; the doctor faces a sentence of up to 8 years for advertising these products, since the company belonged to Armenians. Unquestionably, the purity of the foodstuffs for our children produced by Armenians cannot but be doubted. A serious expert appraisal is needed”, writes the website.

All merchandise doubtful or harmful for the consumer is scrutinized in the first place to establish the “ethnic composition of supplier’s management”. The range of wares was further extended to include any mention of similarity or suspected Armenian origin of the goods, going as far as to cover the regional language labeling.

The Azerbaijani website Gunxeber.соm: In Baku, ladies’ knitted jackets of Turkish production and of colors reminiscent of the Armenian flag have been withdrawn from sale. “In the beginning, sellers did not understand what the problem was, but were shocked as they did and realized the blunder they had committed. The sellers took away all jackets and promised to send them back to wholesalers who had imported the wares from Turkey,” writes Gunxeber.соm website.

The Azerbaijani website Bizim Yol: The second floor of the newly constructed Bina shopping center in Baku, houses a ladies’ wear shop where all clothing is of Armenian brand “Artsakh”

. Eyyub Huseynov, Chairman of the Free Consumers Union of Azerbaijan, stated in an interview to the newspaper that although the State Service for Consumer Market Control under the Ministry of Economic Development had previously identified and removed from the market Armenian mineral water, cigarettes and coffee, today, this service does not control the market for unknown reasons.

The Azerbaijani website Haqqin.az published a photograph of a menu in Traveler’s Coffee, a fashionable restaurant in Baku. The photo showed Armenian lavash indicated as an ingredient of one of the dishes. Siraj Piriyev, Traveler’s Coffee corporate lawyer, found the author of the photograph, social journalist Azer Aydemir, and addressed to him several strident letters with threats of litigation and trouble. “In so doing, the lawyer S. Piriyev acknowledged the presence of the Armenian lavash in the restaurant and hurried to point out for some reason that the owners of Traveler’s Coffee have already corrected this small (?!) mistake by replacing the word “Armenian” with “Azerbaijani,” reports the website.

The Azerbaijani newspaper Yeni Musavat: The Deniz supermarket of Baku sells Indian tea that has some labeling in Armenian. The production and packaging of the tea is commissioned by a Russian company Dialogtorg and takes place in Sri Lanka. The press secretary of State Committee on Standardization, Metrology and Patents of Azerbaijan, Fazil Talibli reported that the sale of merchandise with labeling in the Armenian language is prohibited in Azerbaijan. “Recently, dried fruits labeled Sevan in Armenian were discovered on sale in the Masally District. The shop was fined by the Committee, and the wares were seized and withdrawn from sale”, said Talibli and noted that goods featuring a label in Armenian and the Armenian flag are prohibited in Azerbaijan.

The Azerbaijani website Gundelik-bаku.соm writes that the colors of the Armenian flag can recently be seen in the appearance of food and trade outlets on the streets of Baku and regions of Azerbaijan. Thus, the website gives the example of the gas station located on the square near the former bus station in the 3rd residential community of Baku that was painted after renovation in colors of the Armenian flag. “Before, the gas station was only painted in dark blue, but now orange colors have been added”, reports the website indignantly. In addition, the website discerned a link to Armenia in the name of the gas station H-Petrol by noting that there are gas stations in Armenia with this name deciphered as “Hаyаstаn-Petrоl”

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The Azerbaijani website Ара. az: Import of spirits and tobacco goods prevented to Azerbaijan Brandy, vodka, cigarettes and coffee were discovered to contain substances harmful for the human body <…>. The import of Armenia-produced brandy, vodka, cigarettes and coffee was prevented to Azerbaijan. This report was received by APA from the State Customs Committee. Laboratory research carried out with modern equipment at the Central Customs Examination Department of the State Customs Committee revealed that the products were made with breaches of manufacturing techniques and were unfit for use. Harmful substances were identified in these products. The State Customs Committee reiterates its warning that the import of such commodities is inadmissible and will be vigorously deterred.

The tendency of barring entry for any literature published in Armenia, irrespective of its content, holds a special place.

Azerbaijani customs officers seized from the director of the regional representative office of the Institute for War and Peace Reporting, journalist Shahin Rzayev a book by an Armenian author Tatul Hakobyan entitled “Karabakh Diary: Green and Black”.

<…> “This occurred yesterday at the customs checkpoint of Boyuk-Kesik as Rzayev returned from Georgia, from an Internews event where he had purchased the book. The customs officials seized the book under the pretext that it “was published in Armenia” and made an entry to this effect in their report.