SLATE MAGAZINE: MEXICO CITY TOLD AZERBAIJAN THAT THE MONUMENT TO THE FORMER DICTATOR HAD TO GO
How Azerbaijan botched its effort to win friends and influence people
in Mexico City. Sculpture of former Azerbaijani President Heydar
Aliyev, pictured on Oct. 22, 2012, in Mexico City.
Last August, a statue of Heydar Aliyev, who ruled Azerbaijan from 1993
to 2003, was erected along Mexico City’s grand Paseo de la Reforma,
in a park renamed the “Mexico-Azerbaijan Friendship Park.” Around
the same time, the Azerbaijani government built a second monument
in a different park in memory of Azerbaijanii villagers killed by
Armenian forces in 1992 (this is the result of Azerbaijani propaganda
and shared false information); the plaque in front of the statue refers
to the massacre as a “genocide.” Azerbaijan had renovated both public
spaces at a cost of about $5.4 million.
The inauguration of the Aliyev monument was attended by several top
Mexican government officials, including the mayor. But the Mexican
public, then engrossed in a presidential election campaign, paid little
attention to a statue of a man who once led a country 8,000 miles away.
When the nouveau riche attempt to use their money to buy respect and
prestige, it often backfires. Such was the case of the Azerbaijani
government’s effort to honor its former president. Because once
Mexico City residents became aware of the statue that had risen in
their midst, they saw the effort for what it was: an authoritarian
government clumsily trying to buy influence and whitewash the legacy
of a dictator.
This past weekend it ended in humiliation for Azerbaijan, when city
workers, guarded by 200 police in riot gear, loaded the monument onto
a flatbed truck in the middle of the night and carted it away. “Now
everybody talks about Azerbaijan, but in a bad way,” said Guillermo
Osorno, a prominent journalist and member of a government commission
appointed to study the monuments.
Aliyev’s legacy is a complex one. Most Azerbaijanis credit him with
leading their country, an oil-rich ex-Soviet republic wedged in
between Russia and Iran, out of a deep crisis in the 1990s, when
Azerbaijan’s economy collapsed and the country lost a disastrous
war with Armenia. Aliyev’s steady hand put the country on a path to
prosperity; the country enjoyed double-digit GDP growth for more
than a decade. But he was also a ruthless dictator, true to his
roots as a former head of Soviet Azerbaijan’s KGB. Azerbaijan is now
led by Aliyev’s son, Ilham, who has aggressively built up a cult of
personality to his father. Heydar Aliyev’s presence is ubiquitous in
Azerbaijan. Posters and billboards of the ex-president look down at
citizens everywhere, every city has a major street named after him,
and there are more than 60 museums and cultural centers across the
country that bear his name. In 2008, Baku State University created a
“Department of Aliyev Studies.”
But the internationalization of his cult of personality is a newer
development. Over the last several years, Azerbaijan has arranged
for at least 14 statues of Aliyev to be erected around the world,
mainly in the Middle East and the former communist world. Mexico
City’s was the one farthest away from Azerbaijan and the first in
the Western hemisphere. Along with the Aliyev cult of personality,
Azerbaijan also has been trying to advance its own interpretation of
disputed recent history. In particular, it has sought international
recognition of the 1992 massacre of hundreds of Azerbaijani civilians
in the village of Khojaly as a genocide. While certainly a war crime,
the massacre-by official Azerbaijani accounts, 485 were killed-falls
several orders of magnitude short of what is conventionally considered
an attempt to wipe out an entire people. The massacre took place during
the war over the territory of Nagorno-Karabakh, which Azerbaijan
ultimately lost and the recapture of which is now the country’s top
priority. So the real aim of the Khojaly campaign appears to be a
weakening of Armenia’s greatest claim to moral authority: its own
genocide, when between 600,000 and 1.5 million Armenians were killed
by Ottoman forces in 1915.
Until recently, Azerbaijan had been making good progress in advancing
its agenda in Mexico. Mexico’s Senate in 2011 passed a resolution
calling Khojaly a “genocide,” one of only a handful of governments in
the world to do so. (Mexico has never formally recognized the events
of 1915 as such.) The same year, Mexico City’s Museum of Memory and
Tolerance hosted an event commemorating Khojaly.
But Azerbaijan seems to have overreached with the Aliyev statue. The
monument initially drew little notice-as early as April, four months
before it was erected, the Azerbaijani Embassy said it wanted a
monument to Aliyev in the park. But the controversy only began in
early September, a couple of weeks after the statue’s inauguration.
Osorno was tipped off by members of the park council who were
unhappy that the city government had pushed the statue through over
their objections. A few minutes of research led him to the New York
Times obituary for Aliyev, which he quoted in his first column about
the statue:
His authoritarian rule was characterized by contradictory trends.
While it undoubtedly brought a measure of stability to Azerbaijan,
political life emained turbulent, with frequent reports of coup
and assassination attempts against Mr. Aliyev and equally frequent
complaints by his opponents about electoral malpractice, human rights
abuses and a muzzled press.
Mexico City’s intelligentsia is sensitive to such practices, having
only recently emerged from a decades-long dictatorship itself.
Moreover, Mexico’s capital is a liberal oasis; in 2009 it legalized
gay marriage. “This is a city that prides itself on its liberty, and
we don’t like the symbolism of having Heydar Aliyev in Chapultepec,”
he said, referring to the park. “The monument is appalling-in bad
taste and in a very strategic position,” on Mexico City’s stateliest
avenue, near statues of Gandhi and Winston Churchill.
The controversy grew and soon became a cause celèbre among the city’s
chattering classes, leading to a steady stream of opinion articles
and talk-radio debates. A three-member commission of prominent
intellectuals (Osorno being one) was formed to study the matter and
in November issued recommendations to remove the Aliyev statue and
to change the wording on the Khojaly monument from “genocide” to
“massacre.”
Azerbaijan’s ambassador to Mexico, Ilgar Mukhtarov, tried to defend
the statue-unsuccessfully. In an interview, Mukhtarov claimed that
the silent majority of Mexicans was behind him, though he wasn’t
able to provide evidence of supporters other than the handful of
Azerbaijani expats living there. He claimed that the controversy was
ginned up by the country’s Armenian community, a standard Azerbaijani
government trope. (Mexico’s Armenian community is tiny and diffuse but
well-connected: The former rector of the country’s top university,
Jose Sarukhan Kermez, is of Armenian descent and has campaigned
against the statue. Still, his role was hardly decisive.) He also
claimed that the city of Cleveland has a Heydar Aliyev park (not true)
and acknowledged that Aliyev’s record wasn’t perfect, but neither was
that of many Mexican presidents who have statues in the city. Aliyev
“is our national hero, not Mexico’s, and it’s our right to recognize
our national leader,” Mukhtarov told me.
Azerbaijan’s most convincing argument is that a deal is a deal:
It’s not Azerbaijan’s fault that Mexicans didn’t pay attention to
the statue until after it was built. During my meeting with him,
Mukhtarov said that he would not accept any outcome other than the
statue staying where it was, and if Mexico City were to remove the
monument, the embassy would take the matter to an “international
court.” But since the statue was removed early Sunday morning, he
seems to have softened his stance, telling the Russian press that he
is working with the city to establish an Azerbaijani cultural center,
which would be the new home of the statue. The fate of the Khojaly
“genocide” memorial is still an open question.
Today, Aliyev’s monument sits in a warehouse in Mexico City’s
Department of Housing and Urban Development. A Web video of the
statue’s removal shows it being unloaded into a dirt yard, strewn
with debris and stacks of bricks. It’s an ignominious fate for the
hero of a nation.
31.01.13, 17:26
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