Two football players from the Russian club Torpedo of Armavir were deported from Azerbaijan immediately upon their arrival at the airport of the city Ganja in July 2011 on the account of their Armenian origin. Mehman Allahverdiev, the head coach of the Azerbaijani football club Kapaz, had invited Armenian football players for an audition, however, it was reported that he had had no prior knowledge of the Armenian origin of the Russian players. Their arrival drew a great uproar at the airport of Ganja. The officers of the State Border Service returned the Armenian football players who held Russian passports on the same plane in which they had arrived.148
In 2010, the Armenian delegation was unable to board a plane from Moscow to Baku to attend the 64th General Assembly of the European Broadcasting Union due to the wrongful acts of the Azerbaijan’s representative office of Aeroflot Air Company.149
The representatives of the Armenian delegation were about to board the plane when the representative of the Azerbaijani side asked the passengers if there were any Armenians among them. Hearing an affirmative answer, she asked Armenians to hand over their boarding passes and step aside. After all passengers including numerous participants of the EBU General Assembly boarded the plane, the boarding passes of the Armenian representatives were shredded, and they were told that passenger seats in the plane were complete which by definition could not make any sense as the tickets of the Armenian delegation members were in the business class. Moreover, the boarding pass indicates a seat assigned to a specific passenger; therefore, it is virtually impossible to register two passengers for the same seat.
In November 2011, the officers of the passport control service at the airport of Baku denied entry to the interim head of the Public Relations Department of the company Beeline Kazakhstan, Mr. Bayram Azizov on the ground that he had previously been to Yerevan on a working visit;150 incidentally, he was a citizen of Kazakhstan and an ethnic Azerbaijani. The aggrieved person had to spend 48 hours in the transit zone of the Baku airport before his deportation to the country of origin. It is worth mentioning that Mr. Bayram Azizov tried to seek assistance from the head of the Azerbaijani state by posting a message on the Twitter account of the president Ilham Aliyev: “Good day! Please, help me! I’m a citizen of Kazakhstan. It’s almost 48 hours since I have been in the transit zone of the airport of Baku. Border guards have seized my passport, and I don’t understand the reason of my detention. I have to sleep on the floor and feed myself on instant noodle! I’m running out of money! The Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Republic of Kazakhstan has been made aware of the situation”. Unfathomably, both postings somehow disappeared from Aliyev’s Twitter account.
In reply to a remark from a journalist of Vesti.az news agency to the effect that a person who had visited Armenia would face difficulties in entering Azerbaijan, the aggrieved person said that he had traveled into Georgia approximately a year prior to that and could easily cross Georgian-Armenian border despite his Azerbaijani ethnicity indicated in his passport.151
Reasons for denying entry:
1. Visit to Nagorno-Karabakh Republic through the territory of Armenia;152
2. Visit to Armenia;
3. Armenian origin, existence of Armenian relatives or friends, expressing feelings of sympathy towards Armenia or Armenian people;
4. Incapacity to secure the safety of Armenians visiting Azerbaijan;
5. Suspicions of a terrorist threat;
6. Existence of a law to that effect;
7. Names that arouse suspicions because they sound Armenian, or an alleged relation to Armenians;
8. Persons whose relatives or acquaintances have committed insulting or outrageous acts from the Azerbaijani perspective (a concert by a popular singer Philip Kirkorov was canceled in Baku because at the time his father was helping an Armenian disabled boy153).
Sufian Zhemukhov: The secret of my name was revealed during my visit to an international workshop in Baku, to where I flew from Istanbul. At customs, a good-looking Azerbaijani lady checked my passport. <…> In fact, that lady called an officer of Azerbaijani special services and handed him my passport. The officer joined his colleague at the other end of the hall where they long conferred together and even made some telephone calls. After that, they beckoned me and asked: “This name of yours, what is it?” <…> Then they asked me bluntly: “So, this means it’s not an Armenian name?” Then, it all dawned on me. These cloaked Turkish officers and their simple-minded Azerbaijani colleagues took me for a crafty Armenian trying to sneak into their country! <…> “No, no, Sufian is not an Armenian name”, reassured them I. And I breathed a mixed sigh of relief and anguish. It seemed that the problem was not my name but their anti-Armenian complexes. <…> Later, An American told me that he, too, had had problems at the Azerbaijani customs because his passport had an Armenian visa. Although as it is, it appears that they should never stop bowing, if they take an American passport into their hands. This put my mind in rest about my red-skin passport. Of course, I have heard that Armenians and Azerbaijanis dislike each other, but I never knew that it was that serious.154
Zurab Dvali: The first hassles started when we measured the height of the wall once and then began to build the same scene for the shooting.”But you have already measured the wall, why are you doing it all over again?” asked a cheerless party official sporting a golden signature of H. Aliyev pinned on his lapel. <…> “Oh, no,” groaned the vigilant party leader Abbasov. “You are deceiving us; you have come here to shoot something else!” And precisely at that moment he noticed a book in Georgian that a member of our expedition, geographer Kakhi Jelia was holding in his hands. “What is this?” he asked. “A book on ancient Georgian architecture”. <…> The book published back in 1979 and authored by a famous scientist Ilia Adamia was a bombshell for Abbasov. All of a sudden, he started calling someone and went off into a loud discussion accompanied by an intensive body language. Then, seeing our bewilderment, he finally uttered: “The Armenian finger!” We all exchanged bewildered glances without understanding the meaning of it. Only later did we find out that the party bigwig somehow thought that the last name ‘Adamia’ was an Armenian one. Another ten plain-clothes officers rushed to his ear-piercing scream. We were surrounded, but refused to hand over the book. But our work had to be done, and amid this disapproving buzz of the local populace, we started the shooting. Our every step, our every move around the village was supervised from three cars that accompanied us.
<…> We had no other choice but to give everything up and head for the border. As we were leaving Balakan, we were intercepted by a state security car cutting in front of us and were escorted to the Office of Islam Rzayev, the Chairman of the Executive Committee of Balakan region. The indefatigable party leader kept pointing his finger at our book and finally asked: “Who is Adamia?” “A Georgian scientist”, we replied. He looked at Abbasov. “Georgian? Not Armenian?” asked Rzayev again with a dubious voice. “ADAMIA is a Mingrelian last name”, we all admitted in unison.155