Azerbaijan Diary: A Rogue Reporter's Adventures in an Oil-Rich, War-Torn, Post-Soviet Republic

Twice during the recent years, in 1992 and in 1994, I visited Azerbaijan with a group of other French journalists. All I have heard about this country was the war in Karabakh and oil reserves. I was biased, filled with pro-Armenian information typical to most of the Western media. However, the truth I found, from first hands, eyewitnesses, people who experienced the horrors of that bloody conflict changed my view by 180 degrees. I think the author of this book, Thomas Goltz, underwent the same experience as I did.

In fact, Armenia proved to be the aggressor, Azerbaijan was the victim! The crimes of Armenian military units against Azerbaijani women, children, elderly can not be described in any human language. Dead bodies were mutilated, eyes pierced, ears torn, people were burned alive. I know that because I have seen the pictures and actually visited the sites of these massacres. And I am grateful to Thomas Goltz that he made sure the world knows about the truth. Particularly, the chapter of the book concerning Khodjali massacre deserve a special recognition.

Who were those Armenian militants, what did they want?

They were so-called "freedom fighters", their desire was to create "Great Armenia", "Black Sea to Caspian", "to clean Caucasus from Azeri Turks' (i.e. Azerbaijanis). They were armed by Russian weapons and ideological fiction of Armenian "historians" which completely ignored the facts and rewrote the entire history of the region. Their idea was about the "supreme", "most ancient" Armenian nation which has a "historical right" to take back "its lands", by killing, raping destroying everybody on its way. And that is how the Karabakh war started.

Ironically, this ancient Azerbaijani land now invaded by Armenian military was the home for most of Azerbaijani poets, writers, musicians. There is no credible record in the history that Karabakh ever belonged to Armenia. Even the ancient churches in there were built by Caucasian Albanians, the Christian ancestors of modern Muslim Azerbaijanis. The first Armenians moved there only 150 years ago, supported by Russian Empire.

Anyway, it is sad that Thomas Goltz is one of the few reporters who had enough courage to write the truth about this region. The conflict is still not finished, and Azerbaijan is still subject to illegal Armenian occupation on the verge of 21st century. The country with huge oil reserves and strategic interests of the West is also a constant subject of Russian political-economical attack. Unfortunately, century long propaganda machine of Armenia managed to mislead the world and hide the crimes committed against Azerbaijani population of Karabakh and other lands invaded by Armenians.

Twice during the recent years, in 1992 and in 1994, I visited Azerbaijan with a group of other French journalists. All I have heard about this country was the war in Karabakh and oil reserves. I was biased, filled with pro-Armenian information typical to most of the Western media. However, the truth I found, from first hands, eyewitnesses, people who experienced the horrors of that bloody conflict changed my view by 180 degrees. I think the author of this book, Thomas Goltz, underwent the same experience as I did.

In fact, Armenia proved to be the aggressor, Azerbaijan was the victim! The crimes of Armenian military units against Azerbaijani women, children, elderly can not be described in any human language. Dead bodies were mutilated, eyes pierced, ears torn, people were burned alive. I know that because I have seen the pictures and actually visited the sites of these massacres. And I am grateful to Thomas Goltz that he made sure the world knows about the truth. Particularly, the chapter of the book concerning Khodjali massacre deserve a special recognition.

Who were those Armenian militants, what did they want?

They were so-called "freedom fighters", their desire was to create "Great Armenia", "Black Sea to Caspian", "to clean Caucasus from Azeri Turks' (i.e. Azerbaijanis). They were armed by Russian weapons and ideological fiction of Armenian "historians" which completely ignored the facts and rewrote the entire history of the region. Their idea was about the "supreme", "most ancient" Armenian nation which has a "historical right" to take back "its lands", by killing, raping destroying everybody on its way. And that is how the Karabakh war started.

Ironically, this ancient Azerbaijani land now invaded by Armenian military was the home for most of Azerbaijani poets, writers, musicians. There is no credible record in the history that Karabakh ever belonged to Armenia. Even the ancient churches in there were built by Caucasian Albanians, the Christian ancestors of modern Muslim Azerbaijanis. The first Armenians moved there only 150 years ago, supported by Russian Empire.

Anyway, it is sad that Thomas Goltz is one of the few reporters who had enough courage to write the truth about this region. The conflict is still not finished, and Azerbaijan is still subject to illegal Armenian occupation on the verge of 21st century. The country with huge oil reserves and strategic interests of the West is also a constant subject of Russian political-economical attack. Unfortunately, century long propaganda machine of Armenia managed to mislead the world and hide the crimes committed against Azerbaijani population of Karabakh and other lands invaded by Armenians.

Thomas Goltz should have said much more about Azerbaijani controversial attempts to re-write history and attribute to themselves cultural artifacts produced by other peoples of the region but found within the borders of today's Azerbaijan. Nevertheless, Goltz does point to the weirdness of Azerbaijani myth about the mysterious "Albans," who-not the native Armenians, of course!-ostensibly built thousands of churches in Nagorno-Karabakh and Nakhichevan and then "disappeared" in history, quite conveniently for Azerbaijani pseudo-historians. According to this logic, Azerbaijanis can claim as their own any cultural artifacts that belong to anybody, anywhere in the world... Imagine if Egyptian Arabs start claiming that the ancient Egypt was "an Arabic state" and the Pharaohs were "Arabic kings."

Yet, it is well established that Azerbaijan belongs to the so-called "artificial" countries and is a home of a young, previously non-existing ethnic group. Assembled in the beginning of the 20th from linguistically related but disparate pastoral tribes-known as Afshars, Padars, Qashqayees, Shahsevens, Qajars, Borchali, Kengerly, Demurly, etc. etc.-Azerbaijan designates a nation, which is, in fact, a product of scholarly experiments of Soviet ethnographers of 1930s. The 20th century is notable for the proliferation of nation-states and nation-state-like entities. A vast number of them-especially in the former USSR, Africa and Asia-appeared on the map as a matter of chance, economic exigency, political whim or topographic error. As a result, we currently see on the map countries and lands such as Kazakhstan, Turkmenistan, Yakutia, Namibia, Somalia, Buryatia, Kyrgyzstan, Bashkortostan, Philippines, etc. Similarly to those examples, before 1918 there has never been any state called "Azerbaijan." Further, the term "Azerbaijani" as a name of an ethnic group was created in Moscow's Institute for Linguistic Studies and imposed on Caucasian Turkic-speaking nomads of the Transcaucasus as late as in 1935. To note, the ancestors of today's Azerbaijanis, pastoral Oghuz tribes, arrived from the Central Asia deserts to the Caucasus region between 16th and 19th centuries.

"Azerbaijanis" lacked any clear ethnic self-definition by mid-1930s and identified themselves mainly as a religious community of Shiite Muslims. It is ironic that now, when "Azerbaijanis" have cooked their own state, they call the locales of their former pastures, scattered across the Caucasus and located on the ancient lands of indigenous settled civilizations of Persians, Armenians and Georgians, as their "homeland." At the same time, "Azerbaijanis" are engaged in a ridiculous cultural plagiarism as they try to "prove" that mosques and even churches (!), found in the vicinity of their pastures and built by Persians or Armenians, respectively, were created by and belong to them. Also, Persian medieval writers and poets who had nothing to do with Turkic ethnic origins but had misfortune to have lived on the territory of today's Azerbaijan while it was part of Persian Empire, were proclaimed as "Azerbaijani" authors. Examples: Nizami, Khagani, Fizuli, etc. World scholarship is still in the state of deep outrage by these Azerbaijani efforts.

I've travelled extensively through this region, and (unlike many of the other "reviewers" listed below), I lack ethnic or financial ties to the Armenians or the Azeris. I found this book to be extremely accurate - from its account of the Armenians' destruction of Xodjali and Kelbajar to its comic description of various Azeri politicos. Aside from being an important historic document, it's a gripping read. Goltz is to be commended for his brave, accurate reporting. It's quite obvious that many of the critics listed below are writing out of ethnic hatred for the Azeris, and didn't even read the book. If you want documentation of Goltz's story, check out Human Rights Watch's reports on the subject.

Perhaps the only valuable lesson that can be gleamed from otherwise biased and one-sided Goltz's book is that the resolution of the political problems in the South Caucasus will come only with Azerbaijan's realization that it must reform the fundamental characteristic of its particular political basis-the megalomaniac Azeri idea of ethnically pure "Greater Azerbaijan." Only by abandoning ethno-nationalism for nationalism, which strikes at the heart of Azerbaijan's entire existence since 1920, can Azerbaijan deal successfully with the its own minorities and bordering states alike.

Azeris believe that oil of the Caspian will help them to buy more arms, attract mercenaries, brainwash international public on their way to enlarge the contemporary Azeri state to a "Greater Azerbaijan from the Black Sea to the Caspian to the Persian Gulf," as touted by Azeri opposition in Baku all the time. The attempted genocide against the Armenians of Nagorno-Karabakh that was aimed at ethnically cleansing Azerbaijan's territory from its indigenous minorities was only part and the beginning of a larger project to re-draw the map of the entire Caucasus and the Middle East. Azeri nationalist program is aimed at annexing Armenia's southern territories and Iran's northern territories, something that is not concealed even by the Azeri Foreign Ministry and Azeri President Heydar Aliyev. Karabakh resistance was a blow to Azeri encroachments. But for how long would the Azeri nationalist knock-out last? Goltz's book suggested that not for long...