Mubariz Ahmadoglu, political analyst: Azerbaijani missiles will cover the distance to Metsamor nuclear power plant and nuclear waste storage facilities in an incomparably shorter time than is necessary for any government to recognize the state named Nagorno-Karabakh. This scenario can be prevented only by the signing of a BPA (Big Peace Agreement) which can become a new resource in Karabakh conflict settlement.266
Adil Haribov, Director of the Institute for Radiation Problems of ANAS suggested provoking an artificial earthquake with a magnitude of 9 in Armenia to test the resilience of Metsamor nuclear power plant under extreme conditions.267
Polad Bülbüloğlu, Azerbaijan’s ambassador to the Russian Federation: <…> Every Azerbaijani must take part in the liberation of our lands. <…> If the military path is chosen to resolve the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict, much will depend on Azerbaijanis who live in Russia, and each of us must be ready for this. If anybody hopes to stay behind and sit snug at home, while the army fights to reclaim our lands, that won’t be happening. The entire country, the whole society, all the people must rise and clench themselves into a single fist to back our president and liberate the lands. It cannot be otherwise.268
Anar Mamedkhanov, ex-member of the parliament of Azerbaijan: I keep telling our officers who study military science in Turkey: “You are needed in Karabakh. They (Armenians) must be killed in Karabakh and not in other countries.269
Abulfaz Elchibey, ex-president of Azerbaijan: Armenians, Kurds, Lezgins, Circassians and Romanies are our internal enemies. Can you see how many enemies we’ve got? Prepare well before delivering your blow. May Allah help you!270
Another much admired form of inculcating armenophobia consists in parading one’s own personal input or details of one’s life necessarily depicting episodes related to humiliating, insulting or harassing Armenians.
Arif Gaziyev, founder and head of Mugham theater: We always started fights during the breaks, and as the school was not far from a river, we often cut the classes to gather there singing and playing hide-and-seek. But the most memorable detail was probably how we flung stones at Armenians who always sought to play some dirty tricks.271
Igbal Aghazadeh,272 chairman of the political party Umid: At the time, I did my military service in the Soviet Army, in the Kemerovo Oblast. It was in 1988. Azerbaijanis were in a desperate plight. There were just too many Armenians there. After I returned to Baku, the Sumgait events were the talk of the town. <…> We realized that our people were obliterating Armenians and we looked positively at the fact. <…> Yes, it happened as I was a 5th grade student. We had this teacher of Russian, Alla Petrovna Chebarina. She used to look down on us as a nation by treating us disparagingly and insulting us. We frequently debated with her, but she continued to humiliate us. Once, as she left the classroom, I broke her umbrella, though later I had to pay 27 rubles for it.273
The unabashed propaganda of armenophobia at the highest level could not but draw the attention of the international community. Global Post, an American online newspaper notes that the President of Azerbaijan Ilham Aliyev not only doesn’t like Armenia, but is not afraid to say it, nor to tweet it. President Ilham Aliyev’s Twitter followers were treated to a string of more than 30 messages about his neighbor that were distinctly undiplomatic and, in fact, can be considered as downright abusive. “It’s tempting to imagine Aliyev hunched in solitude over a laptop like so many an online troll”.274
Foreign Policy, an American magazine, asks: “What do Azerbaijan, Estonia and Rwanda have in common? Not very much, you say? Au contraire! All three countries, it seems, have presidents who are prone to picking fights on Twitter”. “The lesson in all this for world leaders? If you’re going to pick a fight with somebody and want people to notice, you’d better do it in 140 characters at a time”, says the journal.275
Heydar Aliyev, ex-president of Azerbaijan, in his speech pronounced on October 13, 1999 in Nakhichevan said: In times of trouble, the people of Azerbaijan saw the help of Turkey and the Turkish people and is grateful for that. Particularly, in 1918–1919, during the struggle for independence under the leadership of the great Atatürk, who cleansed his land of Armenians and other enemies, the Turkish people and Turkey offered their help to Azerbaijan, to Nakhychivan.276
9. Armenophobia in the mass media
The process of intensifying anti-Armenian propaganda and planting hatred in the society must be viewed in the context of an aggression targeting the Armenian identity and the Armenian statehood.
The mass media and journalists have carved out a special niche in this process as they are on the one hand active consumers of this state propaganda and ideology, being at its forefront in dealing directly with their patrons and masterminds without any mediation unlike general public, and on the other hand, they act as the very partisans and agents who translate the propaganda and ideology into the reality.
In this context, the Azerbaijani journalism is under double pressure; after taking its fair share of hatred and aggression, it runs them through itself to pour into the masses now clad in their own judgments and vision tinged and worded as they deem fit.
With the fueling of the aggressive sentiments and incessant but empty promises of a looming showdown, the problem of venting the bottled up charge of the negative feelings still persists. Without this vent, the aggression and hatred get channeled inwards which leads to rampant crime, spiking suicide rate and other social calamities.
All of this can bring about a frustration aggression, i.e. the aggression aimed against those who become an obstacle in achieving the significant goal. And the significant goal in the modern Azerbaijani society is shifted from the primary to secondary needs; that is to say, the solution to problems related to social and living conditions, legal issues, culture and education has been ousted by armenophobia and its ensuing mission of “reclaiming Karabakh”. And until the return of Karabakh and the annihilation of Armenians,277 the age of happiness will not dawn on land of Azerbaijan.
The journalists, who unlike the general public enjoy an opportunity to express their emotions, but lack direct access to target of their hatred, displace their aggression from the frustration dimension into the verbal plane. In this way they meet the needs of their patrons (the authorities), their consumers (the people) and their own.
The blatant manifestation of the verbal aggression is the barrage of verbal abuse from the leading Azerbaijani press, which can be defined as an active direct verbal aggression278. The active direct verbal aggression is a form of an aggression that amounts to inflicting psychological damage using mostly such components of speech as insults and humiliation of another person, group or community.
It must be noted that, apart from their own analysts, the Azerbaijani mass media actively quote experts, historians and artists from both Azerbaijan and abroad; foreigners are invited to Baku and are willingly given platform for airing disparaging comments about Armenians. And the grosser and harsher the outrage, the more positive response it meets from the Azerbaijani community, civil society and power structures.