HATE MEETS HISTORY IN AZERBAIJANI CARTOONIST’S ANTI-ARMENIAN ART
by Simon Ostrovsky
Agence France Presse — English
October 3, 2005 Monday 3:32 AM GMT
Venom dripping from its fangs onto a Swastika, only the efforts of
powerful arms grasping metal pincers restrain a black serpent and
its desire for global domination, in a drawing displayed at a Baku
gallery recently.
This could be the description a World War II-era Soviet propaganda
poster depicting the concerted effort of the allies as they hold back
the menace of Nazi Germany and the Axis forces.
But this poster — and others like it, recently on display in the
Artists’ Union in former Soviet Azerbaijan — are the recent works
of an Azerbaijani scientist-turned-cartoonist.
You may not have heard of it, but the author Kerim Kerimov is on a
mission to blow the whistle on “Armenian hegemony.”
Slithering across a watercolor globe towards Azerbaijan, the serpent
is Kerimov’s metaphor for Armenia and its “Greater Armenia” policy
while the six arms grasping the pincers represent Azerbaijan’s Turkic
brethren from Turkey to Turkmenistan.
The president of Azerbaijan’s National Geophysicists Committee,
Kerimov is better known in oil circles for his role in the signing
of the so-called “contract of the century.”
The mid-1990s Caspian Sea oil deal marked the launch of development —
with Western participation — of Azerbaijan’s sizable oil reserves,
which Kerimov assessed on behalf of the Azerbaijani state.
Few know of his prolific political drawings however, which have
appeared in Soviet and later Azerbaijani newspapers for nearly
50 years.
Much of his work targets Armenia, against which Azerbaijan fought a
bloody war, and in large parts complements the government’s official
information campaign against the Caucasus nation.
Anyone in Baku will tell you that Azerbaijan has many enemies: Armenia
with its Russian backing, Armenia’s wealthy diaspora, Azerbaijan’s
own opposition forces and perhaps a few loose clerics from Iran.
Kerimov goes further and puts the enemies into pictures, with horned
and bewarted horrific caricatures of Armenians clawing at the map of
Azerbaijan or driving a wedge between the country and its ally Turkey
with a giant bomb.
Schooled in the style of Socialist Realism in the days when both
Azerbaijan and Armenia were constituent republics of the Soviet Union,
the 72-year-old Kerimov is a self-described disciple of Russian
WWII-era cartoonist Boris Yefimov.
But if Yefimov is remembered for his drawings of a contorted Hitler
in the pages of Soviet propaganda sheets, Kerimov has set his sights
on tackling Azerbaijan’s modern-day foe.
“I don’t want Armenians to see an enemy in me,” he said however,
claiming he has received death threats from Armenians and other
“enemies” of Azerbaijan.
“I want them to see that the policies they are carrying out are wrong;
then life will be better for both peoples.”
But his stated peaceable intentions might prove to be a tough sell to
Armenians, who in his drawings are alternately depicted as big-nosed
hairy demons or sometimes white-hooded Ku Klux Klan members.
In the Caucasus, Armenia’s neighbors often implicate Armenians in a
conspiracy to expand their territory through military conquest and
migration that has been in action since World War I when they were
expelled from Ottoman Turkey.
It is a charge that Armenians deny and attribute to biases which have
evolved since that war.
More recently, Azerbaijan and Armenia fell out over control of the
Nagorno-Karabakh enclave in the twilight days of the Soviet Union,
when Moscow’s centuries-long rule over the Caucasus began to crumble.
After the fall of communism, the newly independent republics launched
into a full scale war over the mountainous region, which ended in
a tense ceasefire in 1994 with ethnic-Armenian forces in control of
Karabakh and seven surrounding Azerbaijani regions.
From: Emil Lazarian | Ararat NewsPress