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In countries like Azerbaijan, which lack a developed civil society, governments monopolise and regulate all aspects of public life. This state propaganda, disguised as education, is designed to produce a generation for whom ethno-nationalism will be central to their worldview, and the decline in the educational level will only contribute to it, historian Sabir Akhundov writes on Open Democracy.

According to the article, Azerbaijan’s post-Soviet memory politics are great at uniting society. Too bad it is against external enemies. The first four days of April 2016 saw a short conflict between Azerbaijan and the Nagorno-Karabakh Republic. The result was inconclusive, but it revealed the extent of polarization in Azerbaijan and how unequal forces in the opposing camps are in this country.

Few people in Azerbaijan dared to condemn the clashes, which resulted in many victims. Those who did faced a solid wall of national-patriotic fervor, which included even people who had previously called themselves liberals and human rights advocates. To find yourself beyond the borders of this patriotic front was riskier than just losing your voice in the crowd. The wave of popular euphoria at the possibility of even a small victory (won at great cost) spent among the Azerbaijani society.

According to the author, the origins of the present situation go back to the first days and months of Azerbaijan’s status as an independent state. Azerbaijan’s new elite had to find news sources of legitimacy and select geopolitical allies. Political decisions had to be backed up by ideology, culture and education, and this ideological imperative defined the route taken towards establishing a new nation — mythologisation instead of modernisation.

The lack of a positive outcome to the Nagorno-Karabakh Republic and the conflict’s tragic events have led to a situation where Azerbaijan’s new national ideology can present the entire population as victims.

This mood has been carefully manipulated by the political elites to further the nationalist discourse. Nationalism has allowed them to unite pro-government and opposition forces for whom playing the nationalist card is a sure winner.

The author writes that nationalism points its finger straight at the source of all misfortune — the eternal external enemy. The disparity between the glorious past and recent humiliating defeat has created a certain cognitive dissonance, but nationalism has found another enemy, without whose help its opponents would have been defeated. This is, of course, the military support given by Russia to Armenia and the Armenians. It happened this year over Nagorno-Karabakh; it happened in 1918. So a clear link is established between these two events, and Azerbaijan has an alliance of sworn and implacable enemies, Russia (i.e. ethnic Russians) and Armenia.

In the official narrative, the scale of century-old hostility and Azerbaijan’s human loss has been gradually inflated until it reached the level of genocide — which is precisely the case with the Azeri-Armenian clashes of the early 20th century. History books usually refer to these events as the “March clashes” or the “March massacre”, but in Azerbaijan they are known as the “March genocide”. These events were thus to serve as a demonstration of the “bloodthirstiness and unscrupulousness” of Armenians. Selected extracts from police interrogations of the time were published. Photos of Azerbaijani victims were also published — these images loom large in the secondary school history curriculum.

“On the Azerbaijani Genocide”, a directive signed by former Azerbaijan president Heydar Aliyev on 26 March 1998, played a major role in the commemoration of the Karabakh conflict as part of a centuries-old enmity between Armenians and Azerbaijanis, and it was this document that definitively confirmed the “genocide” as an important element in official ideology.

The author writes that the subject of “genocide” arose in 1998, as there was lack of ideological stability among the country’s rulers. 1998 should have been a presidential election year. It was still a long time before the “oil rain,” and Azerbaijan’s leadership did not have complete control over the republic’s political life. The directive “On the Azerbaijani Genocide” was first and foremost intended for “internal consumption.” The ideology of Azerbaijani nationalism, better known as “Azerbaijanism”, was a trump card in his internal political game.

It was also important to choose the events of March 1918 as a key instance of genocide, rather than the clashes of 1905-1906. The latter had lasted longer, but were less well researched and less interesting — no one knows, for example, the number of fatalities, which are usually represented as a vague “thousands and thousands”. By contrast, it had been clearly established that a minimum of 12,000 people died in the tragedy of 1918. There are no figures for Armenian and Russian victims of the clashes.

Since 1998, more figures have come to light in Baku, Baku county, and throughout entire Azerbaijan. There are now known figures for the capital Baku itself (12,000) and for the Baku region (20,000), although these figures are often confused. The history textbook for senior secondary school classes now gives an overall figure of 50,000 for all the regions affected by massacres of the Muslim population, but in 2010 Djabi Bairamov, deputy head of the Historical Institute of Azerbaijan’s Academy of Sciences, put forward a new, huge figure of 700,000.

Yet another reason for concentrating on the events of 1918 is the calendar. The closeness of the dates has allowed people to mark the anniversary of March 1918 not long before 24 April, when the Armenian genocide is annually commemorated.

Over the years, the concept of the genocide has been modified by historians, politicians and political writers. It is no longer just a question of the extermination of Azerbaijani Turks in 1918: we now talk in terms of a poly-ethnic genocide of Tatars, Lezgins and Jews.

However, according to the author, the reasons why Armenians are supposed to hate people of these ethnicities is never discussed. There is talk of more than 3,000 Jewish victims. A major role in collecting and propagating such information is played by Israel’s Azeri diaspora, especially the Azerbaijan-Israel International Association, which openly supports the Azeri government. In this context, it is also worth noting that Azerbaijan and Israel enjoy close military cooperation with one another.

The author writes that the most important element in the commemoration of mass tragedies is the creation of “places of memory”. The main place where the victims of March 1918 are remembered is Baku’s Avenue of the Martyrs, which is visited by thousands of people. The Azerbaijani government is very much in tune with the mood of its population and deliberately uses the term Shahid to play on people’s piety. By drip-feeding them religious rhetoric, it has aimed to speed up the desecularisation of the country and in doing so, strengthen its own hold on power — and the policy has been effective. Russians and Armenians are no longer just ethnic enemies, but part of an alien Christian world.

In September 2013, another place of memory, the Guba Genocide Memorial Complex, was created and has also become a pilgrimage site in northern Azerbaijan. In 2007, a mass burial was discovered in the area, and although initially Makhmud Kerimov, president of Azerbaijan’s Academy of Sciences, warned against jumping to conclusions, suggesting that it could have been the result of an epidemic, the government propaganda machine rushed to exploit the news. The general conclusion has been that this was part of the “genocide” carried out by Armenians in 1918.

According to the author, The Guba events are included in the history textbook used for the fifth year of Azerbaijan’s schools. In one chapter, its authors write about an elderly woman visiting the burial site with her granddaughter and finding the skeleton of her sister, which she recognised by a medallion that had belonged to her. From the reaction of some pupils, one can say that the story’s main aim — to act on the children’s still unformed consciousness — was successful. The youngsters recalled that reading the story brought tears to their eyes.

The same idea lies behind a school ritual followed every 31 March, Genocide Day. As on other dates connected with tragic events, 20 January (the “Black January” of 1990) and 26 February (the murder of innocent residents of Khojalu in 1992), this usually takes a theatrical form, with pupils dressed in mourning reading poetry, as well as competitions for drawings on the theme of war.

This is how the image of victimhood is consolidated in the child’s mind, as is the parallel image of the Enemy, who will with each year loom ever larger and more terrifying. The pupils must understand that Armenia’s hostility has lasted for centuries, is still strong and will continue in the future.

The author writes that the growing generation will never even consider any possibility of peaceful coexistence. The chapter on ‘The Division of Azerbaijan’ in the fifth year Azerbaijan History textbook states: “On 21 March 1828, the day of Novruz, a fictitious ‘Armenian province’ was set up in the area of Nakhchivan and Yerevan, thus rewarding the Armenians for their treachery against our people”.

And in the same textbook, in the chapter on the March 1918 massacres, we read that: “the Armenians went berserk and burned men, women and old people. Children were impaled on bayonets. These maddened Armenian executioners then collected copies of our sacred book, the Quran, made bonfires of them and threw Muslims, bound hand and foot, into them”. And as for the chapter on Stalin’s Terror of 1937, schoolchildren “discover” that most victims were persecuted “thanks to the Armenians, in a continuation of their dastardly genocide policy.”

The rest of the narrative can be summarized in one passage from the eleventh year textbook (for 18 year olds): “A prominent role in the organization of the Terror was played by… Armenians, genetic enemies of the Turkic peoples, who held senior posts in the police and security services”.

The first mention of the Karabakh conflict starts in the textbook “Cognition of the World” for third-year students in Azerbaijan. It claims that “their country” is currently at war with the Republic of Armenia, which has “captured a part of their territory,” and that Baku is able to return it militarily. However, according to the textbook, Azerbaijan does not want to do that and wishes to return the territories peacefully. Other textbooks for schoolchildren have information about the participation of the Soviet authorities in the conflict -- defined in the textbook as “the Moscow patrons of the Armenian authorities” in the conflict -- which resulted in the conspiracy on the mass expulsion of “the Azerbaijanis from their ancestors’ lands in Armenia.”

The Aghdam events are most often mentioned and studied in detail in the textbooks, including in those of literature and cognition of the world. The text in the books is an exact reiteration of well-known propagandistic theses promoted by the authorities.

Apart from the material dedicated to the Karabakh conflict, which is studied in earlier classes, “The history of Karabakh” is taught as a separate subject in the eighth year. According to quotations, the textbooks are full of insults towards the Armenian nation in general, and the authors note that some examples in the textbooks can be qualified as hate-speech.