#armenophobia

On February 19, 2004, 26-year-old Armenian Army Lieutenant Gurgen Margaryan was asleep in his room in Budapest, where he had come to participate in a NATO-sponsored Partnership for Peace program — a mission meant to promote cooperation and understanding between nations. But instead of peace, he met unimaginable brutality.

In the dead of night, azeri officer ramil safarov crept into his room, armed with an axe. Without hesitation, he delivered 16 savage blows to Gurgen’s defenseless, sleeping body, brutally hacking him to death. Sixteen times. Sixteen blows to a young man who never even had a chance to defend himself. Sixteen blows of pure hatred by a cowardly bastard from a tribe bred to hate and ravage.

And what did safarov do after this unspeakable crime, you'd ask? He didn’t deny it. He didn’t hide. He proudly admitted to the murder, claiming he had done it simply because Gurgen was Armenian. He even declared that if given the chance, he would have killed another. No remorse. No regret. No shame.

This is how Gurgen's Hungarian roommate, Kuti Balash, remembers the evening before the murder: “Gurgen and I were sharing a room at the dormitory. The evening before the murder I was watching a football match between Armenia and Hungary, while Gurgen was sitting at the desk preparing his homework. He just came back from the gym.” Staying with them on the same floor were participants of different nationalities, including ramil safarov and another azerbaijani officer. Balash mentions that there were no conflicts among any members of the group. The subject of international conflicts was discussed only once, during the first day of getting acquainted, but nobody spoke of it afterwards.

On the evening of February 18, Balash had tea and went to bed, as he had fever, while Gurgen Margaryan kept on studying. Around 9:30 p.m. Margaryan went to visit another program participant from Armenia, Hayk Makuchyan, who was staying in another room.

Balash does not remember when Gurgen came back, but early in the morning he felt that someone turned on the light. He thought it was Gurgen returning to the room, but after hearing some muffled sounds, he turned his head away from the wall and saw the azerbaijani officer standing by Gurgen’s bed, with a long axe in his hands.

“By that time I understood that something terrible had happened for there was blood all around. I started to shout at the azerbaijani urging him to stop it. He said that had no problems with me and would not touch me, stabbed Gurgen a couple of more times and left. The expression of his face was as if he was glad he had finished something important. Greatly shocked, I ran out of the room to find help, and ramil went in another direction.”

What happened next testifies that the murder had been planned in advance. It was not a crime of a personal motivations between Gurgen and ramil. Immediately after murdering Lieutenant Margaryan, ramil safarov went to the room of the second Armenian officer, to finish with him as well.

That morning, after committing his first murder, ramil went to Makuchyan's room with an intention to kill him. In the corridor, meeting a classmate from Uzbekistan who came out of the room after hearing suspicious noise, ramil offered him to come and assist him in killing the second Armenian. The Uzbek tried to calm the murderer down but did not manage to stop him.

Afterwards everyone confessed that they were frightened to approach ramil with a blood-stained axe closer than at three meters. Approaching Makuchyan’s room, ramil tried to open it by shaking its handle. As Makuchyan confessed, he usually had a habit of locking doors, unlike Gurgen, but that night he forgot to do it, and the door was locked by his Lithuanian roommate.

Being unable to open the door, ramil started to shout out Makuchyan's name in a threatening voice. Half asleep, Hayk went towards the door to open it, but his Lithuanian roommate managed to save him for the second time. He stopped Hayk from opening the door, as he thought that there was a real threat in safarov's voice and that he might be armed. To make sure, he phoned to another Lithuanian who lived at the same corridor asking him to check whether safarov was armed and what was going on at all. Meanwhile, safarov went to look for Hayk in the room of the Serbian and the Ukrainian roommates, showing them the blood-stained axe and stating that he thirsted for nobody's blood but Armenian. Hayk Makuchyan was told afterwards, that ramil ran to the room of another azerbaijani officer, told him something in azerbaijani, and then ran and stabbed the door of Makuchyan’s room three times with an axe. By that time the second Lithuanian and the police approached.

Justice? There was none. Though Hungary sentenced him to life in prison, in 2012, Hungary handed him over to azerbaijan, 'believing he would serve his sentence' (An investigation by a Hungarian news agency reveals that azerbaijan has used a $3 billion slush fund to facilitate safarov's release and extradition).

The moment he stepped onto azeri soil, safarov was greeted as a hero. A hero! Not only was he pardoned by azerbaijan’s president aliev, but he was promoted, given a home, back pay for his years in prison, and welcomed like a champion—for killing a SLEEPING Armenian.

The theories in Armenophobic pseudoscholarship are various, often intersecting and contradicting both themselves and related conspiracies: “Hays,” the Armenian endonym, are unrelated to the historic Armenians (who were Turks) and are from Syria, India, Italy, Iran, or Turkey; The Armenians have no roots in the modern Republic of Armenia, and have no authentic heritage there, or possibly anywhere; The great Armenian churches and monasteries were actually built by Caucasian Albanians, who themselves were Turks; The contemporary Republic of Armenia is in fact the “Ancient Turkish-Oghuz Land Armenia,” to borrow the title of Alakbarli’s first published work.        While conspiracy theories and nationalist, even racist, pseudohistories are a common phenomenon across the postsocialist space, something peculiar has happened in Azerbaijan; the eccentric ultranationalists, who might be called “The Radicals,” have proven triumphant. Their ideas are popular among the regime-aligned elite, are explicitly sponsored by the state, and flourish on the internet. An agglomeration formed of conspiracy theory and pseudohistory has congealed into a gestalt whole, a world view that increasingly functions as state ideology, and, through networks of GONGOs and community organizations, is disseminated through the patrimonial networks that define the Azerbaijani state and society. This ideology, this “High Armenophobia,” has already begun to transform the region.