The demands that the Azerbaijani government and society have regarding the territories of Armenia no longer astonish anyone. Azerbaijan is not concealing the fact that it denies the Armenian people’s right to independent statehood. Even those Armenian experts who sought some roots of peaceful coexistence within the framework of the Nagorno-Karabakh settlement, after a short-term “peaceful” pause, understood that the situation in Armenian-Azerbaijani relations is much more complex. Ongoing debates with the Azerbaijani government and public quickly revealed other motives. More precisely, they became clearer to many. It is evident that the Azerbaijanis have a claim not only to the lands but also to everything connected to Armenia and Armenians through space and time. Many people still refuse to believe this is possible. After all, we are living in the 21st century, the age of artificial intelligence and cutting-edge technology.
This is nothing new to those familiar with the socio-political life of Soviet Azerbaijan. Since the late 1960s, Armenian history and culture have been prohibited outside everyday life. Everyone was expected to live by the following principle: in Azerbaijan, everything was Azerbaijani. Anyone who attempted to challenge this situation was immediately expelled from this Soviet republic. The conditions created within the country made it increasingly difficult to implement stable and effective state policies. In a country where Armenian stone inscriptions, spanning from the 9th to the 21st century, outnumber the present-day population of Azerbaijan, this principle imposed on public life could never truly take root. First and foremost, it poisoned the consciousness of the Azerbaijanis themselves, many of whom grew up walking past countless Armenian tombstones.
The President of Azerbaijan openly states in front of a camera that all these Armenian inscriptions were made later and must be erased. However, these intentions are causing greater harm to the consciousness of the Azerbaijani people themselves, who are confronted with the blatant lies of their own government. Every local knows when the Armenians began living in the territories of present-day Azerbaijan and how long they have lived there. And only the completely uninformed could believe that “the Armenians who were resettled here only two hundred years ago” could fill this country with their dated medieval inscriptions, from Ghazakh to Baku and from Zangelan to the outskirts of Derbent. Therefore, such an evident public lie by the head of state can only deepen one feeling in the human soul: an inevitable reckoning for this kind of treatment of the Armenian people. They saw this once, during the collapse of the Soviet Union. The feeling continues to haunt the Azerbaijani president to this day, as he endlessly repeats the word “revanchists.”
Armenians must clearly understand the trend described in this text. Nowadays, when Azerbaijani territory has expanded to include “Western Azerbaijan,” extending as far as the Armenian capital, Yerevan, it is clear that “the fundamental principle of identifying everything as Azerbaijani” will quickly spread to the entire territory of the Republic of Armenia. Peaceful relations must be built with an understanding of the collapse of humanistic values in the souls of such peoples.