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Heydar Aliyev patiently realized the policy of “mankurtization” of the Azerbaijani society, perfected in the corridors of the KGB and Politburo, for himself and his family, writes the Turkish diplomat Turgut Er, who served press attaché for the Turkish embassy in Azerbaijan during Heydar Aliyev’s rule, in his book “From Freedom to Tyranny.”

According to Er, when Heydar Aliyev said, “I am an Azerbaijani Turk, free and independent,” he did not really want to be as such.
In his book, the author highlights the dependence of the “Heydarian Azerbaijan” on Russia, explaining this by Aliyev’s lack of power to speak out against Russia. This is the reason why the summit of the leaders of the Turkic world – planned to take place in Baku – was cancelled allegedly because “Azerbaijan would not afford to hold such a large-scale summit.”

Er points out that neither the newspapers, nor the TV covered Karabakh war, while thousands of people were losing their lives there. Heydar Aliyev also avoided that topic in his speeches and spoke no word on that. According to Er’s book, Aliyev’s speeches were quite similar to each other – the information was made up of the same words. “The information the Presidential Administration press services delivered vie the television had one and the same content,” the author writes and points that the person standing behind all this was the second most powerful person in Azerbaijan, Ramiz Mehdiyev.

It was Ramiz Mehdiyev, who the people feared and despised more than Aliyev. The Azerbaijanis called him “éminence grise.” “He did not show up to the people, neither did he speak. He just sat silently and with a gloomy air at Aliyev’s meetings,” Er recalls.

An awful censorship was conducted in Azerbaijan: the newspapers were strictly censored before being published. Nevertheless, the government was not satisfied with the censorship and closed down the newspapers that told the truth. Their editors were thrown into KGB basements. As a result of the censorship, the newspapers Azadlig, Yeni Musavat, Mukhalifat and Millet were not published from June, 1994 to 1998.

The answers to the accusations were deprived of any ground. “We are in war, you cover state secrets, you grist to the enemy’s mill, you attempt a coup,” this is what was the state of affairs under Heydar Aliyev’s reign, according to Er. He calls it Ramiz Mehdiyev’s “ideology of Azerbaijanism veiled in lie.”

The state-owned TVs, radio-stations and newspapers also published and ran the information, word for word, provided by the state news agency AzerTag, while the people did not watch TV, did not listen to the radio or read newspapers. “To my mind, some Azerbaijanis from the limited audience of Aliyev’s speeches were barely literate,” Er writes.

People started to joke about the situation with the media. “A person takes his broken TV-set to the repairer and tells him, ‘Bro, be quick, fix it. The children are getting bored without it.’ In response, the repairer gives him one of Aliyev’s numerous photos he had in his workshop saying, ‘Bro, take this home. Let them look at this until I fix the set. After all, he is the only thing shown’.”
To be continued.

After the publication of the book “From Freedom to Tyranny: As if Stalin and Beria revived,” the authorities in Azerbaijan accused Er of libel and anti-Azerbaijani activities as he unmasks Heydar Aliyev’s two-faced government and proves that Aliyev’s actions were often conditioned by personal interests rather than the benefit of the state and people. In response, Turgut Er said that everything he wrote in the book is based on well-known and published documents, and the accusations of libel are yet another proof of the Azerbaijani authorities’ stupidity and meanness.

Related:
Turgut Er: Heydar Aliyev is known worldwide as atheist, communist and KGB general