Yes, I’m back again with yet another newsletter about the Circassian Genocide. I promise, I’m not trying to meet any quotas and Robin is not forcing me to write these at gunpoint. I’ve just been in a perpetual state of annoyance ever since I read this article on APA, an Azerbaijani pro-government media outlet, about how important it was for the world to recognise the Circassian Genocide as ‘another stain on Russia’.
Important context: APA’s content is objectively not journalism — it’s drivel dictated by the government that has laid total waste to independent media in the country, rendering the scene virtually barren.
This article was born out of an ongoing diplomatic row between Baku and Moscow, which began in December last year after the fatal crash in Kazakhstan’s Aktau of an Azerbaijani Airlines (AZAL) flight headed from Baku to Grozny.
In the months following the crash, Azerbaijan has gone from hinting at Russia possibly having shot down the plane to straight up accusing it of doing so and covering up its tracks.
The dramatic fallout between the two peaked in June, with the two countries detaining quite a few of each other’s citizens. Azerbaijani pro-government media was locked and loaded, regularly generating criticism of Russia.
There is no shadow of a doubt that this APA article on the Circassian Genocide is part of that campaign.
It quite extensively details the events leading up to the genocide and its impact on the North Caucasus and the Circassians — the vast majority of whom were exiled from the region. It criticises Russia’s refusal to acknowledge the genocide and it’s eradication of the Circassian language, culture, and historical memory.
It says Azerbaijan and the Circassians were bound together by ‘collective traumas caused by imperial policies’ — either the Russian Empire’s or the Soviet Union’s. It notes that Circassian diaspora organisations in Turkey were among the first to not only express condolences to Azerbaijan over the AZAL crash, but they also condemned the act ‘as another example of imperial violence and disregard for law’, declaring that ‘Russian imperial brutality is not just the pain of one nation, but a shared grief for all peoples of the region’.
It also claims that interest in the Circassian Genocide in Azerbaijan was growing among local media, researchers, and civil society activists — all driven closer by the shared suffering wrought on them by Russia.
Could this be a sign that Azerbaijan might recognise the genocide? Gosh, I certainly hope not.
We’ve seen Azerbaijan tout its championing of oppressed indigenous peoples’ rights before with its targeting of Western European nations with brutal colonial histories — most notably France, which openly and staunchly supports Armenia.
In that absurd episode, we saw France accuse Azerbaijan of supporting riots in one of its overseas territories, New Caledonia, claiming that Baku ‘made a deal’ with Caledonian pro-independence leaders.
In the months since, we’ve seen an evidently government-linked Baku Initiative Group host a variety of seminars and conferences decrying the effects of European colonialism on indigenous people around the world.
While I recognise that the recognition of other nations’ tragedies will always be political in nature, I do want to see more countries recognise it, as with Ukraine’s own recognition of the Circassian Genocide earlier this year or Georgia’s recognition in 2011.
However, I believe an Azerbaijani recognition will do the cause more harm than good.
Aside from it coming from nowhere, it would be based on a disingenuous ‘anti-colonial’ narrative, made even more absurd by Azerbaijan’s own miserable track record. Let’s not forget the Aliyev regime continues to oppress its own indigenous Talysh population and that it ethnically cleansed Nagorno-Karabakh of Armenians in September 2023. On the global stage, Azerbaijan also materially supports the Israeli warmachine in its ongoing genocide of Palestinians in Gaza.
Would the Circassians celebrate an Azerbaijani recognition? Err, possibly, but that remains to be seen, and I’ll sleep better if it was met with condemnation instead.
