Aleko Partsvaniya, journalist, notes: “Peacefulness and tolerance are other characteristic features of Azerbaijanis. Here, people do not like aggression and resort to it in very rare cases. With one exception. The name of this exception is Armenia. Armenia is hated. They do so with all their heart and their entire state. I do not know all the details of the story with Karabakh and I do not think that most of the Azerbaijanis do, but Armenia is hated for Karabakh. They are taught to hate Armenia from the primary classes. I won’t be surprised if the situation is similar in Armenia, but here things can get ridiculous. In Baku it is even impossible to find the CDs of a Western group, if any of their performers is of Armenian origin”.530
In April 2012, at the session of the Euronest Parliamentary Assembly held in Baku, during the meeting of the Committee on Social Affairs, Education and Culture, the question of the Azerbaijani textbooks was brought up for discussion. The Armenian deputy, Aram Safaryan asked: “Is it true that your schools and textbooks contain propaganda of hostility and hatred to Armenians?” To that, the Minister of Education, Misir Mardanov531 replied: “There is a vast chasm between our societies. And today’s event is a step towards bridging this chasm. I don’t know what is written in your books, and you don’t know what is written in our books. Therefore, it is hardly possible to find an answer to this question in a single day or during a single event. Questions of this nature call for very serious studies by specialists”.532
Fatherland, textbook for the 5th grade: … It was 1945. In January, fierce fighting raged on the Baltic shore near the city of Mitawa. As before, the brigade of the General H. Aslanov was in the vanguard. The victory over the enemy was drawing near with every new day, and it seemed that the tankmen of the courageous general will be the first to enter Berlin – the den of fascism. This was the situation on January 24, 1945 as the heroic son of our people who had gone through the horrors of Stalingrad, through the hell of the Battle of Kursk, General Hazi Aslanov died under obscure circumstances. Who knows, maybe in revealing the circumstances of this death, another case of base Armenian perfidy and treachery will be unearthed?533
The website Musаvаt.соm conducted a survey among scholars, pedagogues, psychologists and deputies on the subject of “whether the Azerbaijani textbooks contain propaganda of hatred against Armenians”. Venerable respondents did not refute the presence of armenophobia and set about expatiating upon the question why armenophobia became reflected in the academic literature”.534
Tahir Ibragimov, a teacher of history with a service record of 25 years, considers that textbooks reflect the truth about Armenians. In his opinion, with a war going on between the two peoples, it is impossible to create a positive image of the enemy. “Children must have real information about their history. Facts about Armenians may not be distorted. Besides, by the age the children are given these classes, they already possess information about the real deeds of Armenians. In our textbooks, we cannot write the opposite”.535
T. Ibragimov also believes that textbooks do not contain any denigration of Armenians, but report true facts: “If these facts make Armenians uneasy, let them change their nature. We may not raise our children in lies just to please them. Presently, there are thousands of pupils whose parents are refuges from Karabakh. They know what Armenians did long before their history classes. Why should we deceive them?”
The dualist approach taken by the psychologist Elmira Qasimzadeh is worthy of a note. On the one hand, she believes that “a textbook should not be turned into an instrument of vengeance” and “instead, attention must be paid to forming historical thinking in pupils. The textbooks must contain essential points enabling to assess one’s country and motherland correctly. I wouldn’t like our patriotism to be measured in the extent of our hatred”. On the other hand, she says the following: “In our textbooks, I never saw any appeals to kill Armenians or the ideas that Armenians are our enemies. My own child goes to school. Indeed, children are well-informed of the wrongdoings perpetrated by Armenians from television and books. How can we conceal from children the tragedies of January 20, Khojaly and the occupation of our lands?536 Or, children must learn the whole truth about the history through a factual language: you can’t teach children a false history”.537
A pupil of the 11th grade, Hasan Nagizadeh, expressed his full agreement with both the author of the textbook and its content.
The author is Azerbaijani. Of course, he intends to arouse enmity. This is how it should be”, said he. “They definitely don’t want to prepare us for peace. We don’t need peace. Armenians have committed a multitude of bloody crimes against us. The peace would mean disrespect to those who fell in this war.538
With reference to the above, we offer the reader a few extracts from the Teacher’s guide on patriotic education of preschool and schoolchildren and Teacher’s guide for the patriotic education of children.539
Developed by: Scientific and Methodological Department of the Republican Children’s Library after F. Kocharli and the Methodological Department of the Central Library after S. Vurgun.
Approved by: The Ministry of Culture and Tourism of the Republic of Azerbaijan Baku 2009 Explanatory note: The guides suggest specific scenarios and recommended words and phrases to be pronounced by the facilitators; besides, the Methodological Guide recommends this training for children starting from the age of 3.
The first facilitator: Our lands must not remain shahids540! Our grandfathers protected this land from the enemies not to be now sacrificed to the calamity of the century, the Armeniandom! The tombstones of the Turkic sons in the Shahids’ Lane are not lined up so that some Russian soldier could say: “Don’t be so anguished, your leaders have sold Karabakh long ago”.
The second facilitator: If the motherland becomes shahid (see above), what can we reply to the infant held in his mother’s embrace on the square and crying “better death than retreat”?
No, the son of Turk, no! You won’t let your land become shahid! Let us swear an oath, all those who have Turkic blood running through their veins, let us swear an oath that even if this world turns upside down, the enemy hands will be cut off from our land! Let us swear an oath that we will avenge every single drop of blood spilled by our shahids and turned into the tears of the earth. Let us swear that our oath will not be like our other vows. Let us swear this oath!