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Commentaries of the NKR MFA Information and Analytical Department on the mass media questions about the Azerbaijani party’s speculations on the “Kurd subject” in the context of the Azerbaijani-Karabakh conflict

Question: Lately, it has become popular in Azerbaijan to look for the Kurd Labor Party (KLP) militants in the NKR. Recently, Nizami Bahmanov has joined the supporters of conducting an “antiterrorist operation” against the KLP militants allegedly available in the NKR. What are these modern tendencies in Azerbaijan’s policy aimed at?

Commentary: Due to the ethnic origin of the governing clan in Baku, the “Kurd subjects” is one of the most sensible domestic policy topics in modern Azerbaijan. The matter is not only in the fact that representatives of the mentioned ethnic group occupy many high-level key posts in Azerbaijan, but also in the role of the “Nakhichevan clan” ancestor, former head of the AzSSR KGB Heydar Aliyev in creating and training Turkey’s number one enemy - the Kurd Labor Party (KLP). Researchers refer the Turkish leadership’s traditional cool terms with late Aliyev-senior just to this circumstance. During his visit to Baku in January 2003, former leader of the ruling Party of Justice and Development in Turkey Radjep Erdogan stated that sections of the Kurd Labor Party operated in Azerbaijan, screened by cultural events. R. Erdogan’s statement caused such a violent reaction in Azerbaijan that the then Minister of National Security of the country Namik Abbasov had to make an official refutation. It is notable that Namik Abbasov did not exclude that there might be such persons in Azerbaijan supporting the KLP and rendering financial assistance to it, but their activity, as Mr. Abbasov assured, was “under the control of the Azerbaijani law enforcement bodies”.

In this context, the immediate reaction of the Azerbaijani party to the misinformation published in the Turkish press, as well as the following attempts of its officials to get rid of the “Kurd problem” in Azerbaijan and to transfer the focus of attention to the NKR are not accidental. Meanwhile, according to the Azerbaijani mass media, former Armenian villages of the Northern Karabakh were actively populated with Kurds during the recent years.

Question: What aims does Baku pursue, spreading such insinuations?

Commentary: If we set aside the peculiarity of the “Kurd subject”, then the matter is in Azerbaijan’s regular use of its favorite propagandistic tactics of “tracing” urgent issues of international policy and transferring them to the Karabakh conflict. Thus, in different periods, depending on the political situation, the Azerbaijani party stated that the Karabakh movement “was inspired by the western secret services for undermining the communist system and brotherhood of nations”; later, it noted that the Karabakh Armenians’ demand was initiated by the “imperial ambitions of the Kremlin authorities, who had declared war on sovereign Azerbaijan”. In the framework of their informational-propagandistic war, the Azerbaijani authorities and the structures, funded by them, stated on the existence of Al-Qaida camps and a series of radical Islamic organizations, laboratories for producing nuclear weapons, and nuclear waste burial in the NKR. The Azerbaijani parliamentary delegation at PACE distributed even a document on the Armenian party’s use of nuclear weapons during the military activities in 1991-1994.

Depending on the international political situation, different ways of resolving the Karabakh conflict were discussed in Azerbaijan, which, having the same content, were different in their form. They noted the necessity of holding a large-scale “passport regime checkup”, intensifying the Azeri OMON operations, conducting anti-terroristic operations in Nagorno Karabakh, realizing pointed bombing of the “terroristic infrastructure”, carrying out humanitarian intervention “for saving the Karabakh Armenians from terrorists”, initiating military-police operations for “restoring law and order in Nagorno Karabakh”, implementing corresponding “operations on forcing for peace with Azerbaijan”, etc.

So, the tradition of presenting itself as a victim of “local demonstration of the international evil” is not new for Azerbaijan. It fully corresponds to the tactics of solving the Karabakh problem with cat’s paw, which Azerbaijan actively fulfills in the context of its European, American, and Russian policy.

However, if previously similar statements were made on an official level, currently, realizing their absurdity, official Baku suggests Nizami Bahmanov for developing such topics. And it’s a pity that Azerbaijan makes use of Nizami Bahmanov in its provocative actions contradicting not only the letter and spirit of the Azerbaijani-Karabakh conflict settlement process, but also the common sense.