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Leaving a Tbilisi cinema one evening in December last year, Alexander Thatcher turned on his phone to see a series of missed calls from his panic-stricken roommate. Someone had broken into their apartment.
Returning home, the US writer and graduate student found the burglars had shunned valuables, but moved furniture about, and has taken his passport, a tablecloth and about 50 GEL (£13.99) left on the coffee table.
“I immediately thought there was something very weird about it, but then the notifications started coming through on Twitter and Instagram saying there’d also been attempts to hack into my social media accounts,” he told Byline Times.
It felt so strange. Nobody in Georgia’s expat community had ever heard of anything like this happening before – the general feeling was just, what the f***
Alexander Thatcher on the break in
Coming just a day before an Azerbaijani dissident journalist was threatened with a knife at a bar in the Georgian capital, Thatcher believes the break-in was carried out by Azerbaijani ultra-nationalists who’d targeted him over a story he’d published in October 2023 on the Western Azerbaijan Community (WAC).
Over the years, Thatcher has faced significant online harassment from pro-Baku accounts over his critical writing, he told VAO News in January.
Technically a diaspora rights organisation, critics say WAC group has served as a key cog in the authoritarian Ilham Aliyev regime’s propaganda apparatus, stoking ethnic hatred by peddling racist and conspiracy-laden narratives designed to legitimise deepening aggression toward neighbouring Armenia, with whom Azerbaijan has been in a continual state of either frozen or active conflict since both South Caucasian countries’ independence from the Soviet Union.
This spectre of mounting Azerbaijani irredentism casts a tall shadow over COP29, due to be held in Baku in November, which the oil-rich Aliyev regime has already been accused of using to greenwash its woeful record on fossil fuel consumption, as well as rampant corruption and long-running human rights violations that, amid the most recent crackdown, have seen at least 25 journalists and opposition figures arrested in the past year alone.
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Last September, the ongoing conflict’s latest chapter saw more than 100,000 ethnic Armenians forced to flee a lightning assault on Nagorno Karabakh, a previously autonomous mountain enclave within Azerbaijan’s borders, following a ten-month blockade that had pushed the region’s inhabitants almost to the brink of starvation.
Emboldened by Russia’s now all but defunct historic role as security guarantor between these two long-warring nations, preoccupied as the Kremlin is by executing Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, Baku has in the months since the fall of Nagorno Karabakh, doubled down on further claims to large swathes of sovereign Armenian territory.
Of particular focus has been the so-called ‘Zangezur Corridor’, which would carve out a clear path to the ethnically Azerbaijani exclave of Nakhchivan in Armenia’s south west and, through it, to Azerbaijan-allied Turkey.
The concept of ‘Western Azerbaijan’ traces its roots back to colloquialisms, referring to ethnic Azerbaijanis forcibly expelled from Armenia, used by diaspora and refugee organisations set up in the late 1980s amid the First Nagorno Karabakh War, during which present-day Azerbaijani ultra-nationalist philosophies were also beginning to take shape as the Soviet Union spun toward terminal collapse.
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Among intellectual figures of the period, however, philologist Aziz Alakbarli would remain fairly unknown until, plucked from relative obscurity, he was appointed to head up the Western Azerbaijan Community after it was formally set up in August 2022.
The organisation has been fairly upfront about its mission and purpose. “Western Azerbaijan [i.e. Armenia] is our historical land, which is established by a number of historical documents, historical maps and our history itself,” President Ilham Aliyev told a gathering of the group’s members in December of that year. “The devastation committed by the Armenians in Western Azerbaijan must be communicated to the rest of the world, [and] I am sure that the Western Azerbaijan Community will do it with the support of the Azerbaijani state.”
As an MP of the ruling New Azerbaijan Party, Alakbarli currently participates in the European Parliament’s regional forum, while one of the group’s youth leaders, MP Kamal Jafarov, similarly serves as a delegate to the EU and the Council of Europe, as well as a member of the working groups for inter-parliamentary relations with the US, the UK, Australia, Italy, Luxembourg, Hungary and Romania, among others.
Alexander Thatcher explains that while the organisation’s operations generally assume a palatable diplomatic tone in international fora, often appealing to the UN charter-assured “right of return” for refugees, the tenor of their activities differs drastically when observed in domestic contexts.
“If you listen to them talk on Azerbaijani TV, they speak in very explicit terms like ‘the land knows the blood of its true owners’,” he says.
There’s no ambiguity to Alakbarli’s statements – it’s not warmongering, its genocide-mongering. He’s talking expressly about the expulsion and killing of ethnic Armenians in Armenia
Alexander Thatcher, journalist
Azerbaijani ultra-nationalists have long pushed historically inaccurate characterisations of Armenians as barbaric nomads, late arrivals originating from Syria or Italy or even as far afield as India, and therefore lacking an authentic claim to any lands in the South Caucasus.
However, since the fall of Nagorno Karabakh last year, and the flight of ethnic Armenians who had inhabited the enclave since the 1990s, these narratives have undergone a wholesale shift from portraying Azerbaijan as the victim of occupation to focus entirely on promoting the kind of territorial expansionism previously condemned as a perceived threat from Armenia.
According to Thatcher, the dissemination of these ideas through the Western Azerbaijan Community and other GoNGOs serves a dual purpose. Firstly, the portrayed need to rectify historic injustices perpetrated by a common enemy acts as a unifying cause for society at large, a call to rally behind the Azerbaijani government while also deflecting from its endemic corruption and deep-seated authoritarianism.