AZERBAIJANI MASOCHISM?
By Tamar Minasian
AZG Armenian Daily
08/06/2006
How stupid one should be to torture his people with false
announcements! It transpires that the Azerbaijanis are very skillful
in this. They do not spare Azerbaijani readership and portrait horrific
scenes trampling common ethics.
To make sure one can only search for “revival of our spirit” phrase on
the Internet and find numerous Azerbaijani websites where our neighbors
post descriptions of inhuman deeds ascribing them to Armenian writer
and publicist Zori Balayan.
After 15 years of futile efforts to find inhuman actions on part of
the Armenian freedom fighters, Azeris have decided to accuse Armenians
of made-up cruelties. Many Azeri internet sources allegedly quote
the words of Zori Balayan from his “The Revival of Our Spirit” book:
“… but only an Armenian whose heart was pulled out and thrown into
the fire can feel proud and satisfied reading these lines.
“When Khachatur and I went down to the basement where they were kept
our soldiers had already a child hammered to a window frame by his
elbows… Then I did to this 13 years old Turk what his ancestors
did to our children… He died of hemorrhage in 7 minutes…
Khachatur hacked his body and threw pieces to dogs…”
Citing this extract from our cruel neighbor’s unhealthy fantasy we
want to calm Azeri readers down saying: “The above is a fable of your
countrymen. Zori Balayan has never published such a book.” It’s also
silly to mention the place and date of publication and the pages of
the quotes (Vanadzor, 1996, pages 260-262) to ring true.
Zori Balayan, who is currently aboard “Cilicia” sailing vessel,
wrote a letter. “Many people call me these days asking whether I
have a book published in Vanadzor and titled ‘The Revival of Our
Spirit’. The question is that for already two years people come across
this dirty disinformation, this perfect nonsense, to put it mildly,
which is said to be a sentence from my non-existing book. I want to
say that authors of these false quotes do not understand that first
of all they discredit their own people.
“I demand that those entitled to protect writers’ rights by
investigating such cases to show the readers the book that was
quoted. I am sure that the human rights are not a hollow sound but
a necessary reality of our life and it has to be protected.”