Armenophobia in Azerbaijan

It must be pointed out that anti-Armenian publications and official statements spike in Azerbaijan as the domestic situation escalates to its maximum amid civil unrest, public outcry, natural disasters, corruption scandals, etc., where the “Leader” is called to account for his policy, and the public gaze must be averted.

To inculcate its ideology, the authoritarian system seeks to sow fear in the society by positioning itself as the guarantor of security. This is the shortest path to achieve goals, which can be defined as state-perpetrated terror tactics within the society itself. Terror tactics call for creating an atmosphere of fear and instability or using the existing instability or security needs of the people to suppress freedoms and tighten the grip on power.

The forces that seek to disrupt the existing status quo get marginalized and labeled as internal enemies with the state machinery cracking down on them amid public condemnation. This process can be described as domestic terror.

To keep the information space under а total control and to ensure а trouble-free functioning of the “enemy images”, those in power resort to such tools as misinformation and disorientation.

The mass media are powerful weapons in the arsenal of propaganda and suit well to advance the current agenda. The authorities that control the mass media and alternative news outlets can influence the public opinion to manipulate it and inculcate the required ideology.

Misinformation is an action that targets a person and represents a deliberate communication of misleading information concerning the true state of affairs.

Misinformation occurs following the chain of events below:

• Misleading a specific person or group of persons (even entire nations);

• Manipulation (of the actions of single person or a group of persons);

• Shaping of the public opinion on some issue or subject.

Misleading represents a direct or indirect deception, communication of false, slightly modified or incomplete information which implies its distorting, misinterpreting or taking the information out of its context.

Manipulation is an influencing technique which directly seeks to re-channel the activities of the people. The following levels of manipulation can be identified:

• Reinforcing values which serve the interest of the manipulator and already exist in the minds of the people (ideas, attitudes and mindsets);

• Partial tweaking of attitudes about some event or fact;

• Fundamental swing of attitudes and mindsets.

Shaping of a public opinion is a step-by-step process, which involves generating views on some subject, phenomenon or situation, sharing information between people, discussions and debates crystallizing into a public attitude in the minds of the people.

Other varieties of misinformation are half-truths or the deceit through non-disclosure.

The information space of Azerbaijan abounds in examples of such half-truths. One of the best-known and widely advertised of such half-truths is the myth of the notorious UN resolutions

, ignored by Armenians”.

Armenia has so far not complied with four resolutions adopted by the UN Security Council on the liberation of Nagorno-Karabakh and its adjacent territories.

The half-truth lies in the fact none of these resolutions presses any demands on the Republic of Armenia for liberation of the “occupied territories”. These resolutions feature a number of points, the first and foremost of which is the immediate cessation of hostilities. In 1993, at the time when these resolutions were adopted, Azerbaijan went on the offensive and never planned to stop hoping to deliver a counter blow and reclaim the territories that had been lost before 1993.

The UN Security Council came up with this request as early as on April 30 1993 in its first resolution No. 822. However, a full year elapsed with another three resolutions issued, but thefirst resolution remained without compliance. The bloodshed continued swelling the number of displaced persons. The ceasefire “without delay” could not imply lingering till May 1994. With such persistent failure to abide by the resolutions of the UN Security Council, can it be claimed that they were complied with in a timely fashion? Which of the two parties breached this cardinal requirement of all resolutions and must bear the primary responsibility for failing to abide by their provisions and becoming the cause of almost all other demands aborted and leading to a massive non-compliance with UN Security Council resolutions?

Of course, no party is free from error but Azerbaijan can rightfully claim the “first prize” in this matter. Even as the country was losing control over its territories, the leadership of Azerbaijan – both Elchibey and Aliyev – persevered in their attempts to score a military breakthrough on the front-line and resolve the conflict by sheer force. Relying on force alone, they ought not to neglect the fact that it might put at risk their own territories, thus becoming oblivious of their shared responsibility for the emergence and expansion of the occupied territories. In its turn, the occupation forced Azerbaijan into the vicious circle of rejected and failed peacebuilding initiatives. Over the years of the Russian mediation, the parties contributed to creating an entire calendar of violations of the ceasefire, derogations from similar agreements and other misjudged peace-building efforts (this is reflected in Resolution No. 884 in a circumlocutory language).

This means that the existence of these resolutions is not disputed, yet taking their provisions out of their context and thereby completely changing the spirit and the letter of the document along with tardy demands for compliance, represent a blatant demonstration of half-truths or downright lies.

This being said, the most common form of misinformation in Azerbaijan consists in distorting information by means of small additions, insertions of text or paraphrases of the original wording.

Azerbaijani website Trend.az: WHO – selling organs of the Azerbaijani prisoners of war by Armenia is unacceptable. The commercial sale of human organs is absolutely inadmissible and is in absolute contravention of the human rights law. This statement was made to journalists by the head of the Committee on Strategic Programs and Special Projects of the European Regional Committee of the World Health Organization (WHO), Mr. Agis Tsouros who thus adopted a stance on the sale of organs obtained from Azerbaijani prisoners of war by Armenia.

In reality, as reported by other information agencies of Azerbaijan (e.g. apa.az) the quote looks different and does not concern the position of Tsouros on Armenia or Azerbaijani prisoners of war but covers instead the general subject of illegal transplantology: “A. Tsouros noted that the transplantation of human organs in the global health care system is done in strict compliance with the law. Such operations are inadmissible, if they circumvent the law. The United Nations also speaks against the illegal transplantation of human organs or even their legitimate commercial sale”.

Or, it may be a contradiction between a loud heading and the gist of the source statement.

Richard Morningstar: Growing drugs on the occupied territories proves true. The United States opposes the cultivation, transport and sale of drugs in any part of the world. “I am not familiar with all the facts on this issue. I do not possess any supporting information. However, we must be confident that all these thoughts and conjectures reflect the truth,” said the ambassador.

Here, the words of the ambassador Morningstar are used in a heading so as to imply that he claims knowledge of illicit cultivation of drugs in Nagorno-Karabakh and confirms this information. While it is obvious from the wording of his direct quote that he is not fully familiar with the facts, and their veracity must be checked.

The main goal of this misinformation process consists in eliciting the required emotional response from the audience, in which the people lose their ability to think reasonably, assess critically and analyze the information they are presented with. Any attempt to understand, clarify or investigate the events is balked at the outset by exerting pressure on the author through defamation, derision, physical action, arrest or even assassination.

In 2007, criminal proceedings were instigated against the Azerbaijani journalist Eynulla Fatullayev for a tentative to revise the official position of Azerbaijan on the tragedy of Khojaly.

Following a trip to Armenia and Azerbaijan, he published a series of articles in the weekly “Realny Azerbaijan” entitled “Karabakh Diary”, where he voiced his confidence over the fact that a corridor for refugees did really exist, otherwise, the population of Khojaly could not find their way out of the encirclement. He also expressed the view that the Popular Front of Azerbaijan may be responsible for opening fire against civilian non-combatants for political reasons.

As a result, he was sentenced to 8 years and was released after four years of imprisonment.

Disorientation consists in misleading the public, propagating fallacious misconceptions and shifting value benchmarks. One common technique of disorienting the adversary or one’s own society consists in “decapitating” a group by discrediting, demonizing or dehumanizing the leader of the opponent group and his/her activities.

A resident of Khojaly, a town razed to ground by Armenians in 1992, claims that he was tortured by the current Armenian president R. Kocharyan

. “I passed out after I took a severe beating from Robert Kocharyan; ever since, I have problems with my eyesight. The entire world must know the instigator who was behind the tragedy of Khojaly and who poses as a democrat,” said Gulali Binaliyev. According to him, on the day when the town was occupied by Armenian forces, he was taken hostage along with his family and suffered torture at the hands of the current Armenian president Robert Kocharyan”.

“The Armenian Catholicos Garegin II is just another terrorist and a bloodthirsty thug as the head of the State Serzh Sargsyan”. This statement was made by Elman Mamedov, a deputy of Milli Majlis from Khojaly in his interview to SalamNews. The deputy stressed that he did not expect any positive results from the meeting between the Haji Allahshükür Hummat Pashazadeh, the head of the Caucasian Muslims Office, and Garegin II: “Allahshükür Pashazadeh is a man of faith while Garegin II is another bloodthirsty thug just like Serzh Sargsyan”.

“It is very shameful that these people claim to represent the intellectuals of Azerbaijan. Their actions can be qualified as high treason. We do not view them as representatives of our country’s intellectuals and demand that Rustam Ibragimbekov and Akram Aylisli be declared persona non grata,” the local media quote a young party official.

When coupled with a visualization technique meant to bring about an emotional surge in the target audience, results can be obtained both rapidly and efficiently.

The American psychologist Victor Kagan

holds that despite its irrational nature xenophobia may be also upheld by quite positive processes. The human being never commits deeds that appear as bad, evil, inappropriate or criminal etc. The mind always transforms any such perspective action into something positive. The motivation of any such deed undergoes a substitution, change, shift and an outward modification portraying it with positive and possibly heroic overtones.

This is precisely the process that Azerbaijan implements through its state machinery. It is clear that the murder of a sleeping person (or an enemy for that matter) is a dishonorable deed. Yet, a slight shift of accents in the rhetoric from “sleeping man” to “the man who desecrated our flag” оr “the feats of Ramil breathed in a new life” may warrant a positive public appraisal.

The political establishment of Azerbaijan chose armenophobia as its weapon in seeking to wrestle the Azerbaijani society into consolidation (assimilation process of ethnic minorities), to minimize the risks of a schism within the country (clan stratification and strife) and to re-channel the popular outcry.

2. The historical axis

Originating, evolving and spiraling among the Caucasian Tatars at the turn of the 20th century along the same tracks as anti-Semitism in Russia, armenophobia now represents an institutional component of Azerbaijan’s modern statehood.

This means that we come to deal with a case of a profound rejection of Armenians in a context where the Azerbaijani perceive them today as educated, successful and wealthy people, whose very existence “stripped” the indigenous majority of their privileges and turned them into “uneducated”, “disadvantaged”, “impoverished” people and so forth.

Historically, Armenians became the axis, around which the ethnic and national identity of Azerbaijanis evolved

. At each point in history, the political and social discourse, the statements of public figures and researchers drew contrasting comparisons between the Muslim identity and Armenians.

The Armenian population with its relatively higher standard of living and higher level of education was seen by the local Muslims as alien and hostile which far from constituting any threat to their survival became a source of permanent sense of “inferiority” further exacerbated by the satirical, public and social discourse of the scant Muslim (Azerbaijani)