David Boyajian’s latest report concerns the corruption and outright criminality of the Aliyev regime in Azerbaijan.
Ilham Aliyev and Vladimir Putin
Azerbaijan = Corrupt + Terrorist + Evil
by David Boyajian
There may be no regime more loathsome and deserving of U.S./European condemnation and punitive sanctions than that of Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev and his crew of criminals and monsters.
Corrupt to the Core
- OCCRP, the international crime/corruption watchdog, named Aliyev its 2012 Organized Crime and Corruption Person of the Year. His family has secretly amassed major “stakes in the country’s … banks, construction companies, [and] gold mines” and snapped up over $140 million in luxury residences abroad.
- By 2021, Aliyev’s crime syndicate had covertly accumulated British property worth $700 million.
- The Azerbaijani Laundromat was a $2.9 billion money laundering racket. It bribed British, German, Italian, and various European officials to whitewash Azerbaijan’s repulsive reputation.
- In 2013, Azerbaijan surreptitiously bankrolled a propaganda junket to Baku for ten Congresspersons and over thirty staffers from IL, NJ, NM, NY, OK, and TX. Aliyev showered them with jewelry, rugs, and other goodies which the Office of so-called Congressional Ethics belatedly forced them to surrender.
- “Respected” American publications and Congress’ Azerbaijan Caucus — including shifty co-chair Rep. Henry Cuellar (D-TX), an FBI target — reportedly concealed Azerbaijan’s crimes.
State Sponsor of Terrorism
- Azerbaijan deployed thousands of terrorists/jihadis against Christian Armenians in the early 1990s, including Afghan Mujahedin, Chechens, and Turkey’s Grey Wolves.
- Azerbaijan had long befriended Osama Bin Laden. Baku’s Al-Qaeda cell belonged to the network that bombed American embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in 1998. A dozen Americans and 212 others perished.
- Columbia University’s Peace-Building/Human Rights program and others have documented Aliyev’s using thousands of terrorist mercenaries in his unprovoked 2020 war against Armenian-populated Artsakh/Nagorno-Karabagh (N-K) and Armenia. Turkey openly transported them from Syria and Libya. The jihadis included one-time ISIS commander/war criminal Sayf Balud and miscellaneous murderers, rapists, and kidnappers. Reportedly, Pakistan also sent terrorists. During the war, Azeri zealots chanted, “Jihad, jihad, jihad.” In Baku? No, in Washington, DC.
- The EU Parliament denounced (January 20, 2021) Baku and Ankara for using “foreign terrorists” against Armenians.
- The UN’s Working Group on Mercenaries condemned (November 6, 2020) Baku’s and Ankara’s hiring of jihadis. Predictably, the UN probe has stalled, doubtless due to obstruction by the U.S. and others.
- The Senate Foreign Relations Committee grilled (July 21, 2021) neo-con Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs potty-mouthed Victoria Nuland about Turkey’s delivering terrorists to Azerbaijan. She refused to answer in open session. That’s consistent with America’s scandalous and long-running downplaying of Azerbaijan’s and Turkey’s state sponsorship of terrorism.
Sheer Evil
- Azerbaijan is unashamedly homicidal/genocidal. Defense Minister Safar Abiyev (RFE/RL, August 4, 2004): “[In] 25 years there will be no state of Armenia … [Armenians] have no right to live in this region.”
- Baku Mayor Hajibala Abutalybov to a Bavarian delegation (2006): “Our goal is the complete elimination of Armenians. You, Nazis, already eliminated the Jews in the 1930s and 40s, right?”
- Nurlan Ibrahimov, a Baku soccer team’s public relations director (Facebook, October 2020): We must kill all Armenians — children, women and the elderly.”
- Azerbaijan has long been obliterating any evidence of Armenia’s three-millennia-long presence. Using sledgehammers and dump trucks, Azerbaijani troops destroyed (YouTube: New Tears of Araxes) a huge 9th-century Armenian Christian cemetery in Nakhichevan. Stalin had cruelly assigned the latter Armenian territory (and Artsakh/N-K) to Azerbaijan in the 1920s. Over time, Azerbaijanis murdered or expelled every Armenian in Nakhichevan. Baku plans the same for Artsakh/N-K. U.S. lawmakers, the EU Parliament, and others have decried the cemetery’s destruction and the ongoing eradication and vandalism of many Armenian churches /monuments, to no avail. The State Department’s reaction has been negligible. Yet consider the uproar by American officials, media, and conservative Evangelicals whenever Jewish cemeteries or synagogues are vandalized/attacked/destroyed.
- Baku’s claims to nearly all of 3000-year-old Armenia are preposterous. No country/nation named Azerbaijan (a Persian/Iranian name) existed before 1918. The region was ethnically/religiously mixed. Some of its Muslims identified as Tatar/Turkish. Only in the 1930s did these start calling themselves Azerbaijanis.
- During/after the 2020 war, Azerbaijani perpetrated voluminous and varied evils and crimes (besides those in/after 1988). Warning: Often graphic and disturbing.
- Executions of captured Armenian soldiers.
- Beheadings (video removed but available).
- Desecration of a dead, naked Armenian woman (videos removed but available).
- Armenian POWs are still imprisoned and tortured.
- Bombardment of Artsakh/N-K’s “ hospitals, schools, local water supply.”
- Azerbaijan used banned white phosphorous and, reportedly, cluster munitions.
- Azerbaijan has illegally blockaded — food, electricity, gas, communications — the 120,000 indigenous Armenians of Artsakh/N-K. Baku has defied an International Court of Justice order to end the blockade. Moscow slyly allows the blockade.
Azerbaijan Overrated
For about 30 years, Artsakh/N-K, with Yerevan’s help, outfought a better-armed, wealthier, and far more populous Azerbaijan. Artsakh became self-governing, democratic, and largely safe from Baku’s savagery.
Only Turkey’s and Israel’s military participation, and Moscow’s deliberate passivity, turned the tide against Armenians in 2020. It’s apparently Tel Aviv’s first martial campaign against a nearly all-Christian country.
Azerbaijan now aims to ethnically cleanse Artsakh and has seized chunks of Armenia.
Meanwhile, Washington and Europe needlessly kowtow to Baku, wildly embellishing its energy-exporting value.
- Azerbaijan supplies a mere fraction (perhaps 3%) of the EU’s natural gas.
- Baku imports Russian gas and reportedly sells it to the West, thereby undermining Western sanctions against Russia.
- Russia owns part of Azerbaijan’s gas fields/pipelines. Aliyev is stuffing Putin’s pockets with Western cash.
- Azerbaijan has no choice but to send its gas westward due to binding contracts, existing pipelines, and lack of alternative markets.
The Right Path
I’ve shown elsewhere that the Caucasus’ swing country is Armenia. Whichever direction it goes, so goes the Caucasus.
Russia’s stranglehold over Armenia and Artsakh remains. But the West’s rejection of sanctions against the obvious aggressor, Azerbaijan, unmasks the duplicity behind its sponsorship of talks between Yerevan and Baku.
Moreover, Washington’s flouting of Section 907’s restrictions on aid to Azerbaijan brings further dishonor upon America.
If Armenians are wise they won’t agree to anything with Baku unless Yerevan gets rock-solid Western security guarantees, hi-tech weapons, and a long-term, armed international peace-keeping force in Artsakh.
Otherwise, given Azerbaijan’s blood-soaked, deceitful record, its signature on a “peace” agreement is worthless.
David Boyajian is an Armenian-American freelance journalist. His primary foreign policy focus is the Caucasus. Many of his articles are archived at www.armeniapedia.org/wiki/David_Boyajian.
For his previous essays at Gates of Vienna, see the David Boyajian Archives.
Mr. Boyajian’s impeccably researched and balanced articles are always eye-openers. What the so-called mainstream media chooses to hide or to ignore, Mr. Boyajian exposes with elan. I challenge anyone who disagrees with him to fault his facts.
It’s depressing to see the mainstream media ignore the torment of tiny Armenia which is surrounded by genocidal Azerbaijan and Turkey while Israel sells the latest in high-tech weapons (drones, for example) to Baku, in addition to providing the Azeri dictatorship with intelligence to kill Armenians. While Zionists make sure the world never forgets the Jewish holocaust, Zionists are helping Azerbaijan launch another genocide of Armenians.
It’s important to note that in the 1890s, the New York Times described, more than once, Ottoman Turkey’s massacres of Armenians as holocaust. That was FIFTY years before the Jewish holocaust.
Re: “It’s important to note that in the 1890s, the New York Times described, more than once, Ottoman Turkey’s massacres of Armenians as holocaust. That was FIFTY years before the Jewish holocaust.”
It is strange, isn’t it, that certain people only want to tell the story of the Holocaust of WW2, but nothing but silence and the proverbial crickets when it comes to remembering on film and in print, the suffering of others who have had genocides committed against them.
I don’t know how many films and books about the WW2 Holocaust have been written or made, but I’d venture to say probably thousands. Maybe into the five figures counting magazines and newspaper stories.
But it took Iris Chang to remember the Holocaust that was the “Rape of Nanking” and who today tells the story of the Holomodor? Or for that matter, the ages-old story of how millions of mostly-Christian Europeans have been taken as slaves or died at the hands of the Saracens down through the centuries?
Scholars of genocide, democide, and mass death refer to the Armenian genocide (1915-1921) as the first “modern” genocide, since it was the first to take place in the age of still and motion-picture photography.
Today, haunting photos survive of Greek and Armenian Christians – girls and young women – crucified upon large wooden crosses and left to die in the desert. The burning of Smyrna survives as a film clip, which was taken from vessels a short distance away in its harbor and offshore.
The late Iris Chang also made an excellent observation about the nature of acts of genocide – namely, that such atrocities tend to occur in pairs. First, the actual act(s) of violence, then the cover-up and attempt to erase it from the historical record.
And speaking of erasure, it seems pretty plain that the Turks on one hand, and the Azerbaijanis on the other, intend to “erase” Armenia entirely. And with the help of the Israelis, no less – who ought to hang their heads in shame at such reprehensible conduct. Especially for a people and a nation with their history it is simply inexcusable that they are doing this.
Well done, Mr. Boyajian. This is not only a land grab, it’s a JIHAD. Christian groups who should be supporting Armenia are misled if they think otherwise.
When you described Aliyev, you also described Putin’s regime.
Putin will rue the day he became butt buddies with moslems.