Note: The author of this article, Peter Lukimson, is an Israeli writer and journalist whose books are among the top 10 popular books of the Moscow Book Trade House – one of the most respected book ratings in Russia.
I wasn’t surprised to hear that Russian journalist Vladimir Solovyev went as far as to say that Azerbaijani people feel “inhuman and bestial hatred” towards all that is even slightly related to Armenia on air and then insulted Azerbaijanis who tried to prove him wrong.
I learned it without surprise but with a great deal of resentment, as such an insult against an entire nation is unthinkable. However, I wasn’t surprised even when he started comparing the attitude of Azeri people towards Armenians to the Great Catastrophe of my people.
Of course, there are many people who are now trying to make the journalist bear the responsibility for his aggressive words, but even if they are successful; it wouldn’t change anything in general: a distorted version of the Azerbaijani-Armenian conflict is still being fed to Russian citizens and to other nations as well.
As an Israeli I understand the indignation of Azerbaijani people better than anyone else, as I often hear the media spreading slender about my country by swapping the victim and the aggressor in the eyes of the public. And Vladimir Solovyev merely voiced the opinion on Nagorno-Karabakh of a considerable part of the Russian population.
People in general have heard only about the Sumgait Massacre that targeted the Armenian population of Azerbaijani Sumgait in 1988 – but the scale of this tragedy was largely exaggerated. What the public doesn’t know is that a large-scale deportation of Azerbaijani natives from Armenia had been carried out in an extremely abusive and violent way some days before the pogrom in Sumgait. The public doesn’t remember that the whole thing started with Armenia’s unfounded claims to the Azeri territory of Nagorno-Karabakh and the occupation of this territory that resulted in the first civilian blood spilt in this conflict.
The average Russian knows about the Armenian pogroms in Baku in 1990 – but also in a distorted version, while he had never heard of the horrifying events in the village of Khojali, that were rightfully called the “Azerbaijani Katyn”. Russians in general are thought to think that the Armenian side is the victim, without being aware of the fact that it is Armenian troops that occupied 20% of Azerbaijani territory and expelled hundreds of thousands of Azeri people from their homes, and not the other way around.
And such shocking claims as Solovyev’s about the Azerbaijani nation feeling ‘inhuman and bestial hatred towards each drop of Armenian blood’ serve the purpose of keeping people in the dark and prevent them from knowing or even wanting to learn the truth about the Armenian-Azerbaijani conflict.
It doesn’t matter that, if it were the truth, then Azerbaijanis and Armenians could never have lived together side by side in peace and friendship in Baku and many other towns and villages of Azerbaijan. It doesn’t matter that, if it were the truth, then Azerbaijanis would never have stood up to protect their Armenian neighbors from hooligans committing pogroms - and I saw that for myself.
All this doesn’t matter, because the propaganda machine is already at work, and many will follow Solovyev’s steps trying to convince people of this false version of history. And what makes the situation even more repulsive is that this falsification draws parallels with the great tragedy of the Jewish people that took 6 million lives. This is a real cause to bring Mr Solovyev to trial and make him provide a solid basis for such a comparison. Why is he comparing the numbers of Jews who lost their lives in the Holocaust to the number of killed Armenians? Could he provide solid evidence of any Azerbaijani official calling for the total extermination of the Armenian people, as the Nazis did? Could he even provide a single example of a massacre of Armenians by Azerbaijanis comparable with the Kojaly cruelties, not to mention with the events of WWII?
The fact that Mr Solovyev is a member of the Russian Jewish Congress makes this manipulative speculation of his even more repulsive.
Each nation has its own brutes, those who commit acts of terror against other nations and confessions. It is true that some Arabs blow themselves up in public places in Israel, and in return some Jews burn down Arab mosques. But there will always be someone who’ll try to show mosque arson as a favorite entertainment of Jews, without paying any attention to the wrathful condemnation of such acts by our rabbis, to the apologies they send to their Muslim counterparts, to the actions of the Israeli police aimed at apprehending the criminals. The same works for the Arab side.
Personally, I prefer to judge the whole people not by its brutes, but by its heroes. And I know that Azerbaijanis in general consider those who took part in Armenian pogroms to be mere hooligans and scum, while Armenians praise military generals who ordered the Kojaly massacre as heroes. So it’s not hard to draw a conclusion here. But I wouldn’t want to become like Mr Solovyev and say anything that might insult the whole Armenian people.
I believe that the both people are good enough to find a peaceful solution to their conflict. To make that happen, however, it is vital to shed all false notions about the nature of and the reasons for this conflict, notions voiced by Vladimir Solovyev (the same is true for the Arab-Israeli conflict).
It is so urgent, because a lie can only generate more lies and hatred and can finally grow to influence politicians’ decisions. And as for Vladimir Solovyev – he is nothing but a carrier of this virus of lies, as a rat is a carrier of plague bacteria – but you can’t blame a rat for being a rat, can you?
Peter Lukimson, exclusively to VK
