Katy Perry Condemned for “Whitewashing the Artsakh Genocide” in Baku Performance
Ms. Perry,
I am writing to you today not just as a journalist, but as the founder of the Truth And Accountability League (TAAL) and a leading advocate for human rights, to express my absolute condemnation of your recent performance in Baku, Azerbaijan. By stepping onto that stage and wrapping yourself or performing alongside the Azerbaijani flag, you have made a choice. You have chosen to sell your global platform, your voice, and your brand to serve as a public relations pawn for an authoritarian regime actively engaged in propaganda and cover-ups for a modern-day genocide.
To perform under the banner of the Azerbaijani flag is to show complete disregard for the memory of over 5,000 indigenous Armenian children and youths who were recently massacred by the Azerbaijani military, an offensive orchestrated with advanced battlefield tech and structural assistance from Turkey, Russia, and Israel. That flag represents the violent starvation, unprovoked bombardment, and systematic erasure of the indigenous population of Artsakh. When you elevate that symbol for a paycheck, you pour salt into the open wounds of grieving families whose loved ones were slaughtered, and you legitimize the regime that orchestrated the genocide, including the forced deportation and ethnic cleansing of 150,000 Armenians from their ancestral homeland of millennia, leaving them entirely stateless.
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With this performance, you have firmly placed yourself in the same league as Dan Reynolds of Imagine Dragons. Like him, you have spent years building a public image centered on progressive values, inclusivity, and standing up for marginalized communities. Yet, also like him, when presented with oil-rich Azerbaijani capital, those loudly broadcasted principles vanished. You cannot selectively champion human rights on Western stages while simultaneously dancing for dictators who violate countless United Nations laws and carry out crimes against humanity.
Furthermore, this complicity cannot be viewed in isolation. Turning a blind eye to the atrocities in the Caucasus (Armenian Highlands) mirrors the catastrophic silence and indirect complicity Western pop icons display regarding the ongoing Palestinian and Lebanese genocides. Art and entertainment do not exist in a vacuum separated from global suffering, nor do they exist separate from your own backyard. You live in Los Feliz, a neighborhood nestled between Little Armenia and Glendale, which is the heart of a Southern California Armenian diaspora of nearly a million people. How do you return to Los Angeles and look your neighbors in the eye after collecting a paycheck to whitewash their genocide? When you take the stage in Baku, you cross the line from cultural entertainer to active participant in a state-sponsored whitewashing campaign.
The TAAL will continue to call out this dangerous hypocrisy. We demand that you acknowledge the immense pain your performance has caused the Armenian global community, reject the propaganda machine of the Aliyev regime, and hold yourself accountable to the universal values you claim to represent.
Vic Gerami
Founder & Chair, Truth And Accountability League (TAAL)
Award-Winning Documentary Filmmaker
Editor & Publisher, The Blunt Post