Reuters, UK
March 12 2009
Azeri-Armenian gay love story strains at taboos
Thu Mar 12, 2009 11:15am EDT
By Matt Robinson and Margarita Antidze
BAKU, March 12 (Reuters) – Alekper Aliyev’s mobile phone buzzed on the
iron table. "What’s going on is a nightmare," said the text message
from one of his readers. "I worry about you. Take care. Don’t give
up."
The 31-year-old Azeri novelist says he knew his latest book would
cause a storm, but he never imagined the police would get involved.
‘Artush and Zaur’ — the story of a gay love affair between an Azeri
and an Armenian amid war between their countrymen as the Soviet Union
collapsed — is cultural dynamite for mainly Muslim Azerbaijan.
By Aliyev’s own count, 150 copies have been sold since the book was
published in January, a tiny number by international standards but not
bad for a homegrown novelist in the country of 8.7 million people.
That was until this week, when Baku’s popular Ali and Nino bookstore
chain — the only one willing to sell Artush and Zaur — said police
ordered the book be removed from shelves.
A book discussion between the author and readers was cancelled amid
reports of threats and intimidation.
"The police told them — if you don’t do it, we’ll do it ourselves,"
Aliyev told Reuters. "And they withdrew all the books from sale."
He said the owner of Ali and Nino had just called to say police had
closed two of their stores. They reopened a day later.
An Interior Ministry spokesman denied any knowledge of the case,
saying: "The police do not interfere in trade and the selling of
books."
FREEDOM OF SPEECH
But some Azeri Internet forums have seized on the dispute as further
proof of Azerbaijan’s disdain for human rights and freedom of
expression under President Ilham Aliyev, who succeeded his late
father, former Communist Party boss Heydar Aliyev, in 2003.
The country votes in a referendum on March 18 on whether to scrap the
two-term presidential limit, clearing the way for Aliyev to continue
his rule indefinitely beyond 2013 if he can keep winning re-election.
Critics accuse the authorities of curbing freedoms under cover of an
economic boom fuelled by reserves of oil and gas piped from the
Caspian Sea to Western Europe. Dissent is discouraged, and sometimes
stamped out.
"I thought democracy meant freedom of expression, freedom of faith and
freedom of the press," read a posting on one blog discussing the saga.
Azerbaijan’s authorities say they are committed to international
standards of democracy, but that they have an obligation to protect
the country from forces they say are trying to sow instability.
LEAP FROM MAIDEN TOWER
The novel, the writer’s sixth, strikes at the hatred that persists
between many Christian Armenians and Muslim Azeris since ethnic
Armenians in the Nagorno-Karabakh region broke away from Azerbaijan’s
rule in the early 1990s.
The conflict still defies resolution or reconciliation. Soldiers
continue to die on the frontline in sporadic clashes, and Baku has not
ruled out taking back the region by force.
Crucially though, the relationship in the book is played out between
two homosexual men, still a taboo subject in traditionally
conservative Azerbaijan.
"My book is a fight against stereotypes," said Aliyev. "In Azerbaijan
there are two main stereotypes, the gay man and the Armenian. The
worst thing you can be is gay or Armenian, or to have any relation to
Armenia."
"I want to deprive them of this instrument, and to explain to people
they should not be afraid." He said police had claimed the book was
"against our values."
"How could such bullshit be written?," an anonymous blogger wrote on
one Azeri forum. "And to make an Armenian one of the main characters!
It was disgusting to read. Some things should be respected — your own
country, for example."
The owner of Ali and Nino declined to be interviewed. The book cover
does not name the real publisher. Currently only in Azeri, Aliyev said
it would be translated into Russian, and friends in Yerevan planned to
publish an Armenian version.
The novel seeks deliberate comparison with ‘Ali and Nino’, the popular
love story of a Muslim man and Georgian Christian woman in Baku, first
published in 1937.
In the end, Nino flees for Georgia and Ali dies defending Azerbaijan
from the invading Bolsheviks after the 1917 revolution. For Aliyev,
Artush and Zaur’s love is equally doomed. The two men throw themselves
from Baku’s 12th century Maiden Tower, long a symbol of forbidden
love.
"Homosexual love is just the background to this novel," he said. "This
book is about our pointless conflict, our pointless war, and about how
oligarchs rule societies in both countries."
(Editing by Mark Trevelyan)