From: dbd@urartu.sdpa.org (David Davidian)
Subject: Your Azeri Fascists Brothers (Was Re: My Bosnian brothers)
Summary: Your Brothers claim Napolean was a Turk 
Organization: S.D.P.A. Center for Regional Studies
Date: Wed, 13 Jan 1993 01:18:39 GMT

In article <93012.093525U52148@uicvm.uic.edu> no-name <U52148@uicvm.uic.edu>
responded to article <1993Jan11.170533.1002@uoft02.utoledo.edu>, esuleym@
uoft02.utoledo.edu who wrote: 

[AZ] My dear Bosnian brothers and sisters!I feel myself awful because I cannot
[AZ] really help you.I'm from Azerbaijan and I know what war is.Let me to 
[AZ] express you my simpathy.I promise you taht here in US,in University of 
[AZ] Toledo we will >try to organize protest action against weak position of 
[AZ] UNO.Sorry,we are not able to do much more.But I want you to know that 
[AZ] people of Azerbaijan are your brothers.Your tears are our tears,your hope 
[AZ] is our hope and your victory is our victory.I understand how difficult is 
[AZ] it to believe,but IN$ALLA,the justice will win. Elin Suleymanov.

[CRO] Thank you for the kind words, I am Croatian, from Hercegovina (the other
[CRO] half of Bosnia-Hercegovina) It seems that we have the same problems with
[CRO] fascists ie Armenians and Serbs. It is interesting that the Armenian and 
[CRO] Serbs flags look alike...
[CRO]
[CRO] -Cro

Should I say that your name "Cro" and a certain bird that is eaten when made a
fool of sound the same? 

For one who professes a heritage of parents & grandparents who killed Serbs as
NAZI surrogates, I find your foolish outburst rather self-exposing. Yes, the 
NAZIS and their surrogates learned well from your brother Turks who 
exterminated 1.5 million Armenians in Turkey during WWI. Today, your Azeris 
brothers continue the Grey Wolf tradition as we shall read:

From: The June 8, 1992 issue of _The New Republic_", page 13:

		_BAKU POSTCARD:  TURKISH BATH_

		by Simon Sebag-Montefiore

My host in Baku, once the oil boomtown of the East and now the capital of the 
independent Muslim republic of Azerbaijan, is a short and comical man named
Ishshat who carries a book called 'One Hundred Great Turks' in his pocket at 
all times. The book contains 100 of history's famous generals and statesmen.  
With the exception of Churchill and Alexander the Great, all are revealed to be
Turks. If in doubt, my diminutive host, who is an amateur pugilist, as well as 
an amateur historian without the slightest grasp of historical facts, will 
reach for his book as fast as a Georgian would reach for his gun.

Ishshat is the architect rebuilding many of the disused mosques in the city of 
Baku on the edge of the Caspian Sea, which was once the center of the
Zoroastrian fire-worshipping cult. Outside the city a flame burns in a 
Zoroastrian temple that dates back to before Muhamed. My guidebook tells me
there are still Zoroastrians in the area, although after 1,000 years of Muslim
fanatacism, Romanov imperialism, and Communist atheism, I find this unlikely.
Ishshat is unimpressed: "First they worshipped fire; then the oil that gave the
fire; then the money that the oil made; the the Russian Bolsheviks who burned
the money." I ask what is the next in this progression. "Allah Now we will 
worship only Allah who made the fire, the oil, the money, and then freed us
from the Russians."

Ishshat tells me the Azerbaijan should be allied with Turkey against Armenia: 
"We are truly Turks.  We speak a Turkic language; we are Musulmen; our only 
hope is to be true Musulmen, independent of Moscow, closer to Turkey. We will
be brothers with Turkey to fight Armenia."

Despite Ishshat's reopening of mosques, Baku is a Western city populated by
Oriental people. Its avenues boast the vast ornate mansions of Baku's oil
tycoons, including Rothchild and Nobel, from the turn of the century, when half
the world's oil was pumped from here. Ishshat is renovating some of these
palaces. He takes me to one thoroughly European mansion, as large as the White
House. The competition to keep up with the Rothchilds was so feverish that
these houses are absurdly over-sized, towering over those of the Azeris.

When the Bolsheviks came to power and massacred the nabobs who owned the
houses, they had a problem finding uses for them. Thus Baku boasts a multitude
of rediculous Soviet-Azeri institutes of Leninist-Azeri-Russian-culture-
literature-and-working-class solidarity. Now once again, these palaces have 
lost their use.

Thus Ishshat's palace is now rented out for weddings: among intricate murals, 
gilded staircases, engraved ceilings, Corinthian pillars, and Gothic facades
(the tycoons of Baku were keener on the trappings of taste than on taste
itself) an Azeri wedding goes on, complete with Turkish clothes, fezes, kebabs,
and coffee. We are greeted by a band of musicians, dressed in flowery blouses
and baggy pantaloons as if they belonged in the court of Suleiman the 
Magnificent, playing Turkish music.

Ironically, Baku, this Dallas of the Orient, became the southern heart of the
Bolshevik revolution. The Nobels and oil millionaires imported people from all
over southern Russia to work in their factories; they became the most 
politicized workers in a turbulent country: Stalin, Mikoyan, Kirov, and a score
of other now despised heroes earned their Red spurs organizing strikes, here.
The Nobel Factory, a Dickensian graveyard of chimneys and rust, became such a
bastion of Bolshevism that the Soviets preserved it as a museum. Tours are 
still available for those unaware that Communists are the most hated of all
infidels in Baku. At the height of the Russian civil war, the famous martyred
twenty-six commissars shot by the Whites were from Baku. But one day's shooting
by Soviet troops three years ago ended the Russian presence here and returned 
Baku to the Orient.

Ishshat was in Lenin Square, in front of the Stalin Gothic Parliament (a
sinister construction of such gigantic ugliness that the old tyrant might have
designed it himself as a sort of domestic joke), that night when Gorbachev's
troops fired into the crowds, killing almost 200 civilians. He shows me graphic
photographs of piles of bloody young bodies. "This boy," he says, handing me a
ghastly picture, "I carried myself to the hospital, but he was dead." At the
former recreational park overlooking the city is a new nationalist shrine where
all 200 are buried in a long line of marble graves, each with a portrait.  
"They buried them here," he explained, "because during the '30s, they buried
Stalin's victims here and then the Russians made into a park and called it 
Kirov Park.  This was an insult to all of us."

The war with Armenia, in which Ishshat believes Russian support Armenia, is the
catalyst of Azeri nationalism. "I have no time for women, wives, or 
prostitutes.  I think only of Allah and the evil of Armenia," Ishshat 
confesses.  When I ask my host about the Turkish genocide of Armenians (in 
which 2 million were butchered during the First World War), he answers, without
irony, "It's a lie. You must read the wrong history books! Armenia is the
Israel of the Caucasus!"

Finally, we are in a Turkish bath, luxuriously outfitted by Ishshat. The old
bathhouse's walls are now covered by a mosaic of little blue stones. The 
manager brings Ishshat and me tea in the anteroom to our bath. All conversation
concerns the war with Armenia: the hatred for their Christian neighbors rises
with each new tale of barbaric atrocity, even though the brutality is on both
sides. The curses on Christians and Armenians fly fast as the steam thickens.  
But Ishshat is determined to convince me that Baku is the Turkic capital of a
triumphant culture that has dominated the history of the human race.

I subsequently find myself lying in a huge tub while a naked Ishshat insists on
pouring buckets of very hot water onto me. As he does so, he says:
"Ataturk-TURK!  Enver Pasha- TURK!  Genghis Khan-TURK!  Napoleon-TURK!..."

"I really don't think Napoleon was a Turk," I protest.

"Yes. Turk. It's history. Maybe you don't know history."

"Well, I don't remember Napoleon being a Turk..."

"Moment!  Moment!"  and he rushes off to return with his book. Sure enough,
Napoleon was indeed a Turk, though neither he nor the French realized it.  
Admitting defeat, I sink into the hot bath, realizing that fanatical Azeri 
nationalism is clearly capable of moving mountains: through the steam and the 
bloodcurdling curses of the naked Azeri worthies who bathe nearby, I pray for 
the souls of the poor Armenians who will be the prey of Ishshat's new 
Napoleonic empire.



-- 
David Davidian <dbd@urartu.sdpa.org> |"The massacres? Oh well! They merely  
S.D.P.A. Center for Regional Studies | amuse me!"  -Talaat Pasha, architect of 
P.O. Box 382761                      | Turkish the genocide of Armenian people. 
Cambridge, MA 02238                  | (Four Years Beneath the Crescent, p 208) 
Newsgroups: soc.culture.bosna-herzgvna,soc.culture.arabic,soc.culture.pakistan,talk.bizarre