Azerbaijan Diary: A Rogue Reporter's Adventures in an Oil-Rich, War-Torn, Post-Soviet Republic

In fact, Armenia proved to be the aggressor, Azerbaijan was the victim! The crimes of Armenian military units against Azerbaijani women, children, elderly can not be described in any human language. Dead bodies were mutilated, eyes pierced, ears torn, people were burned alive. I know that because I have seen the pictures and actually visited the sites of these massacres. And I am grateful to Thomas Goltz that he made sure the world knows about the truth. Particularly, the chapter of the book concerning Khodjali massacre deserve a special recognition.

Who were those Armenian militants, what did they want?

They were so-called "freedom fighters", their desire was to create "Great Armenia", "Black Sea to Caspian", "to clean Caucasus from Azeri Turks' (i.e. Azerbaijanis). They were armed by Russian weapons and ideological fiction of Armenian "historians" which completely ignored the facts and rewrote the entire history of the region. Their idea was about the "supreme", "most ancient" Armenian nation which has a "historical right" to take back "its lands", by killing, raping destroying everybody on its way. And that is how the Karabakh war started.

Ironically, this ancient Azerbaijani land now invaded by Armenian military was the home for most of Azerbaijani poets, writers, musicians. There is no credible record in the history that Karabakh ever belonged to Armenia. Even the ancient churches in there were built by Caucasian Albanians, the Christian ancestors of modern Muslim Azerbaijanis. The first Armenians moved there only 150 years ago, supported by Russian Empire.

Anyway, it is sad that Thomas Goltz is one of the few reporters who had enough courage to write the truth about this region. The conflict is still not finished, and Azerbaijan is still subject to illegal Armenian occupation on the verge of 21st century. The country with huge oil reserves and strategic interests of the West is also a constant subject of Russian political-economical attack. Unfortunately, century long propaganda machine of Armenia managed to mislead the world and hide the crimes committed against Azerbaijani population of Karabakh and other lands invaded by Armenians.


True and very brave   April 7, 2000
Vigen Akhalakiya (Louisiana)
20 out of 29 found this review helpful

I wanted to express my gratitude to the author for telling the truth about Karabakh conflict. I am myself Georgian, but have Azerbaijani and Armenian ancestors too, and I am very ashamed of the inhuman crimes committed by Armenian bandits against Azerbaijani civilians in Karabakh. The value of the book is that it reveals the true face of Armenian propaganda machine which is leading its nation to the great catastrophe. Not only so-called "fathers of nation", "spiritual leaders", and "freedom callers" inspired Armenians to commit the atrocities in Karabakh, but they even tried to blame it on Azerbaijanis themselves, in order to mislead the world community. That is the same if Nazi generals told that Jews killed themselves in Holocaust.

I also admire the bravery of Goltz, who was present at Khojali and Kelbajar tragedies. He very rightly points out the role of Russia in this conflict and how Russia supported Armenia in invading Azerbaijani lands and conducting ethnic cleansing. But he is very far from being biased, and describes the violence from both sides, Azerbaijani and Armenian, and tells the story of this sad war. Unfortunately, the Armenian nationalist press and "historians" still continue to advocate the hatred towards Armenia's neighbors. They lie to yet innocent Armenian youth about "Great Armenia" and "historic rights", distort history and facts, and claim territories from Georgia, Azerbaijan, Turkey, Iran, everybody who happened to be Armenia's neighbor. As a result, people of Caucasus are dragged into endless conflicts and bloodshed, and still can not gain their true independence from Russian regime.


Azerbaijan rewrites history   November 24, 1999
Olexander Boiko (Ukrainian Academy of Sciences, Kiev)
19 out of 37 found this review helpful

Thomas Goltz should have said much more about Azerbaijani controversial attempts to re-write history and attribute to themselves cultural artifacts produced by other peoples of the region but found within the borders of today's Azerbaijan. Nevertheless, Goltz does point to the weirdness of Azerbaijani myth about the mysterious "Albans," who-not the native Armenians, of course!-ostensibly built thousands of churches in Nagorno-Karabakh and Nakhichevan and then "disappeared" in history, quite conveniently for Azerbaijani pseudo-historians. According to this logic, Azerbaijanis can claim as their own any cultural artifacts that belong to anybody, anywhere in the world... Imagine if Egyptian Arabs start claiming that the ancient Egypt was "an Arabic state" and the Pharaohs were "Arabic kings."

Yet, it is well established that Azerbaijan belongs to the so-called "artificial" countries and is a home of a young, previously non-existing ethnic group. Assembled in the beginning of the 20th from linguistically related but disparate pastoral tribes-known as Afshars, Padars, Qashqayees, Shahsevens, Qajars, Borchali, Kengerly, Demurly, etc. etc.-Azerbaijan designates a nation, which is, in fact, a product of scholarly experiments of Soviet ethnographers of 1930s. The 20th century is notable for the proliferation of nation-states and nation-state-like entities. A vast number of them-especially in the former USSR, Africa and Asia-appeared on the map as a matter of chance, economic exigency, political whim or topographic error. As a result, we currently see on the map countries and lands such as Kazakhstan, Turkmenistan, Yakutia, Namibia, Somalia, Buryatia, Kyrgyzstan, Bashkortostan, Philippines, etc. Similarly to those examples, before 1918 there has never been any state called "Azerbaijan." Further, the term "Azerbaijani" as a name of an ethnic group was created in Moscow's Institute for Linguistic Studies and imposed on Caucasian Turkic-speaking nomads of the Transcaucasus as late as in 1935. To note, the ancestors of today's Azerbaijanis, pastoral Oghuz tribes, arrived from the Central Asia deserts to the Caucasus region between 16th and 19th centuries.

"Azerbaijanis" lacked any clear ethnic self-definition by mid-1930s and identified themselves mainly as a religious community of Shiite Muslims. It is ironic that now, when "Azerbaijanis" have cooked their own state, they call the locales of their former pastures, scattered across the Caucasus and located on the ancient lands of indigenous settled civilizations of Persians, Armenians and Georgians, as their "homeland." At the same time, "Azerbaijanis" are engaged in a ridiculous cultural plagiarism as they try to "prove" that mosques and even churches (!), found in the vicinity of their pastures and built by Persians or Armenians, respectively, were created by and belong to them. Also, Persian medieval writers and poets who had nothing to do with Turkic ethnic origins but had misfortune to have lived on the territory of today's Azerbaijan while it was part of Persian Empire, were proclaimed as "Azerbaijani" authors. Examples: Nizami, Khagani, Fizuli, etc. World scholarship is still in the state of deep outrage by these Azerbaijani efforts.


Eyewitness reporting of the post-Soviet aftermath   October 25, 2003
Mike Christie (Austin, TX USA)
18 out of 20 found this review helpful

Thomas Goltz spent six years as a reporter in and around Azerbaijan, starting in 1991. He saw the collapse of the USSR and the start of the Armenian-Azerbaijani conflict, and filed many war-zone reports. The result is fascinating, though a little uneven in places: Goltz is a fine war reporter, but not the best historiographer in the world.

Despite the title, the book is not quite a diary, although there is a good detail of day-to-day detail about life in Azerbaijan (he spent most of his time in Baku). The book's two main foci are the political history of Azerbaijan during this period, and the conflict with Armenia. The political history is done very well -- Goltz introduces a large cast, keeps them fairly distinct, and through his personal acquaintance with almost all of them brings them to life. It's clear that Goltz acquired a good deal of affection for the Azerbaijanis, and he is enraged by the corruption and indifference of many of the Azerbaijan political class. When, in the end, the old Soviet-era fox Heydar Aliyev wins power and actually gets the Caspian oil (and concomitant money) to flow via deals with international oil companies, Goltz is grudgingly respectful -- Aliyev may be lying about his democratic credentials, but he did achieve some benefit to Azerbaijan, which is more than most of his predecessors did.

As I said, Goltz is fond of the Azerbaijanis, and this does come through in his reporting of the war, which as a result feels a little less even-handed. There's no doubt about the accuracy of his central complaint, often-repeated: that the Armenians, apparently with Russian help, were directly involved in the Karabakh conflict, despite all their claims that it was mere "volunteerism"; and that the media has generally been much kinder to the Armenians than they deserve. He is also scathing about the Azerbaijan military's incompetence and corruption; and he finds the time to make positive comments about Armenia, though he spent relatively little time there. Still, he is pro-Azeri, and it occasionally shows.

The blurb urges you to read this for the adventure if you're not interested in the politics or history, and there are certainly some scary moments as Goltz barely makes it out of some of the more dangerous places alive. But I can't recommend it for that alone. If you like politics and history, this is a great source on Azerbaijan in the 90's; it's not great writing but it's interesting and has details you won't find anywhere else.


Rogue reporter's "Azerbaijan Diarrhea"   September 29, 1999
14 out of 26 found this review helpful

I have read Thomas Goltz's "Azerbaijan Diary" with mixed feelings. This fat volume describes a journalist's adventures in the oil-rich Azerbaijan, a country in the Caucasus. Everything goes smooth and even interesting and informative in the text, until and unless Goltz comments on Azerbaijani-Armenian conflict. From those points onwards, "Azerbaijan Diary" turns into "Azerbaijan Diarrhea," where truths, lies and xenophobic trash are all mixed together in a swirl of bigotry and propaganda. While, Goltz rather captivatingly describes the uneasy post-Soviet transition in Azerbaijan, his account on the strenuous relations between the Armenians and the Azerbaijanis runs as an unsophisticated conspiracy theory, lacking insight and depth. The book is full of racist remarks and clumsy attempts to re-write history. Facts in the "Diary" are misinterpreted, misrepresented, turned upside down, with causes and consequences torn apart and then reattached in an ex-post fashion. In other words, the authors makes a series of deliberate logical errors when he interprets events that happened longer time ago from the perspective of the realities, which are, in fact, the consequences of those earlier events. So, why does Goltz sympathize to violent Azerbaijani chauvinism and racism with its idea of Turkic supremacy, and whether he does? What is the undertext of the true message in the book?

Among the students of the Caucasus it is a common secret that Thomas Goltz, a.k.a. "Tommy the Turk," is a hired gun of the Azerbaijani propaganda machine, whose recent task became to cover-up horrific crimes against humanity committed by Azerbaijani chauvinist butchers, Nazi-style ethnic cleansers, and history falsifiers during the aggression of Azerbaijan against the Armenians of Nagorno-Karabakh in 1988-1994. It is tempting to attribute the perversions of the book to the fact that Goltz is a well-known Azerbaijani lobbyist, who dines and wines both in the Azerbaijan's embassy in Washington and in the office of Azerbaijani presidential advisor and war criminal Vafa Guluzade-co-inventor of the hoax of the so-called "Xojalli massacre" and the god-father of Azerbaijani "ethnic purification" projects. It is tempting to find Goltz's motivation in the fact he is paid by oil-dollars for his sycophantic services.

The situation with "Azerbaijan Diary," however, IS more complex and deep. In our world of political correctness and Western hypocritical sterility, aggression and endemic pathologies of human nature are getting suppressed, and increasingly so. Horror movies and violent pornography flicks cannot fully substitute the appetites of assorted pedophiles, hate-mongers, racists and sadists, majority of whom-believe or not-lives among us as rather normal-looking, law-abiding citizens and not as criminals or thugs, as many would assume. The most important thing the freaks are looking for is a spiritual, geographic and intellectual outlet to a real, not imaginary world where rape, killings, pillage, destruction and domination of one group of people upon the other are all made legitimate. They look for their ultimate fetish both on the geographic map and in historical records. Nazi Germany will not work in this respect-people of the world are taught to dislike it. President Milosevic's Yugoslavia too-discredited, de-legitimized and militarily defeated. Anti-Semitism-too old-fashioned. KKK?-no, marginalized and in some places outlawed. So, what remains? The answer is Turkey, with its smaller analogue and ethnic kin in the Caucasus-the self-styled "republic" of Azerbaijan. The book invites his readers to peep into the world where abuse is a law, to masturbate on the idea of being a Turko-Azerbaijani chauvinist, and to experience excitement from the process of creating journalistic hoaxes-like the infamous hoax with "Xojalli," apparently concocted by the authors and Guluzade to humiliate the victims of Azerbaijani violent concept of Turkic supremacy. The impunity of the Turks and the so-called Azerbaijanis-violent Asian tribal migrants responsible for conquering and disintegrating higher Christian Orthodox civilizations of Asia Minor-is simply legendary. In contrast to Nazi Germany, post-Titoian Yugoslavia/Serbia and communist Cambodia, Turkey's and Azerbaijan's experience with ethnic cleansing and genocide is a terrific success story. Not only Turkey effectively avoided punishment, this country is currently considered West's best friend in the Middle East. The record of Turkish savagery is ample: 1.6 million Armenians killed altogether in 1899-1897, 1909, 1915, 1918-1921; 400,000 Ottoman Greeks killed in 1918-1922 (with more than 1.5 million deported); 650,000 Assyrians and Chaldeans, killed in 1914-18; 3 million recently displaced Kurds; occupied and ethnically cleansed Cyprus, etc. The record of Azerbaijani butchery is also impressive, taking into account the size of this country: 30,000 killed and 300,000 ethnically cleansed Armenians in 1905 and 1918-1921, 8,700 killed and 350,000 ethnically cleansed Armenians in 1988-1994, plus the destroyed Christian civilization of the Udins. Azerbaijanis were the first people which re-introduced massacres, mass rape and concentration camps to the post-socialist world, in some part of which rampant nationalism became the only game in town. Later, the ethnic cleansers in Yugoslavia readily borrowed their designs; nor they conceal that Azerbaijanis are their teachers. However, the notion that Azerbaijan was the main and earliest laboratory for ethnic cleansing experiments is nowhere in "Azerbaijan Diary." I have visited Armenian region of Nagorno Karabakh in 1992, simultaneously with Thomas Goltz, when the region was cut off from the outside world and sieged by Azerbaijani troops. Azerbaijanis committed terrible crimes and leveled most of Karabakh to ground by indiscriminate aerial and artillery bombardments. The author only sketchy mentions the Azerbaijani neo-fascists from the "Grey Wolves" notorious brigade; the crimes against humanity perpetrated by these butchers are missing from the text. His mention of the Sumgait massacre in eastern Azerbaijan, which started the armed conflict, occupies little space in his writings. "Azerbaijan Diary" brilliantly performed its main task in the consumer market. In other words, Azerbaijan-with its psychotic and genocidal chauvinism-is becoming a spiritual homeland for the assorted spooks and freaks from all corners around the world, which have already began treating this country as their shrine. And that is an alarming development.