Playing the Patriot

Let's first enumerate a few simple, incontestable facts: in 2004, during a NATO seminar in Budapest, Ramil Safarov, a lieutenant in the armed forces of Azerbaijan, hacks a sleeping Armenian co-student to death, with a hatchet.  In 2006, he is condemned to a minimum of 35 years in jail by a Hungarian court.  In August 2012, he is handed over to Azerbaijan, under a European treaty that allows signatories' citizens to sit out their sentences in their home countries.  Despite assurances to the contrary, once in Baku, he is given a hero's welcome, pardoned, and promoted to the rank of major by the Aliyev regime.  Armenia promptly cuts off its diplomatic relations with Hungary; its president, Serj Sargsyan, issues an uncharacteristically blunt statement a few days later, asserting Armenia's readiness for war.  The plot thickens  when, almost simultaneously, it is revealed cash-strapped Budapest could be the recipient of a token of oil-rich Azerbaijan's generosity in the form of a multi-billion dollar loan.

As usual when base nationalist passions come into play, reactions in Azerbaijan and Armenia were depressingly predictable.  In Baku, the media and an army of regime sycophants praised president Aliyev for a diplomatic coup, unapologetically raising Safarov's racist hatchet-job to those of a national hero.    Armenia's zealots were all too happy to latch on to these actions as proof of the "innate barbarism" of Azerbaijanis, their supposed blood-lust, originating somewhere in the steppes of medieval Central Asia.  Lost somewhere in between were the voices of reason, questioning the Azeri government's actions or calling for moderation, and promptly eliciting familiar accusations of 'treason' and 'prostitution' from nationalist and regime trolls. Ethnic antagonisms require two to tango, and the Armenian-Azeri dance of mutual hatred was once again a spectacle to behold.

Lost in this cacophony of triumphalism and recrimination was also a simple fact: of a corrupt and authoritarian regime using and abusing nationalist emotion to camouflage its utter contempt for democracy and the rule of law.  The government in Baku ranks among the planet's great kleptocracies; thanks to its country's immense oil wealth, the Aliyev clan has been able to amass fabulous riches, according to several courageous exposés by Azeri investigative journalists.  This regime falsifies elections, censors its media, frames opposition members, jails activists for the most trivial offences.  Laws - as to economic propriety, civil rights and political-judicial procedure - are there to be broken at the dictator's and his cabal's whim: in that sense, the Safarov case was nothing exceptional.

In the absence of a democratic mandate, or an ability/willingness to uphold the rule of law, the Aliyev regime latches onto the basest form of 'Ersatz' legitimacy: feigned patriotism.  A search for this 'Ersatz' legitimacy is what drove the Argentine generals into invading the Falklands/Malvinas.  It is what underlies the Assad regime's commitment to the Palestinian cause.  It is what drove the Greek colonels towards their attempted 'enosis' with Cyprus, in 1974.  In short, Aliyev must play up his patriotic credentials in order to dissimulate his (quite unpatriotic) corruption and authoritarianism.  Forget your stolen billions. Forget your trampled civil rights. Think of Safarov and don't forget how our dear leader led him to liberty.

The sous-texte in all of this is, of course, that, just as the Aliyev regime delivered Safarov, it will deliver Nagorno-Karabakh: to the current president, this would be the holy grail of fake legitimacies - Ilham Aliyev, 'liberator' of Daglik Qarabag, saviour of the nation.  In that sense, the glorification of a murderer acquires a much more sinister meaning.  If the government in Baku is serious about ever regaining control over Nagorno-Karabakh and its Armenian population, how exactly is that population to accept its authority when it lionises those who perform hatchet-jobs on sleeping Armenians? Or does the regime in Baku simply not care because it wants the enclave without its current population?  Policymakers in Yerevan and Stepanakert will no doubt make the worst-case assumption and answer the last question in the affirmative.

Suffice it to say that peace processes seldom survive the combination of nationalist posturing and worst-case scenarios.