Azeri Official Slams Writer for Sympathy to Armenians

"Stone Dreams", a new novel by a respected Azerbaijani writer Akram Aylisli, prompted angry demonstrations this week, with angry crowds gathering outside a Baku apartment block shouting "Shame!" and setting photos of the author alight. "I knew that those people would react angrily to my novel. Because they see this novel as something that speaks against them. They would never say that they were wrong in inflaming this war and causing the suffering of these people," Aylisli commented. Aylisli's novel, which looks at the South Caucasus's bitterly fractious history, casts a sympathetic light not on his native Azerbaijan but its traditional rival, Armenia. Aylisli portrays brutal campaigns by his fellow Azerbaijanis against Armenians -- including the notorious January 1990 pogrom in Baku in which Armenians were beaten, murdered by the dozens, and expelled from the city. At the same time, Aylisli avoids portraying Armenians as aggressors and Azerbaijanis the victims -- skipping the February 1992 Khojaly massacre, which is considered by some to be one of the worst atrocities of the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict. Head of Azerbaijani Presidential Administration's Social and Political Department Ali Hasanov has expressed his attitude to Akram Aylisli's novel. "A person being a popular writer disrespects memory of thousands of martyrs," he said at the IV Congress of the Azerbaijani Confederation of Trade Unions. " If a person has no national spirit, he cannot have a sense of humanity. If a person does not have enough civil responsibility, he cannot have human responsibility. How can one flatter other people and slander his own people to present himself as the bearer of human values?" "As the Azerbaijani people, we must express public hatred towards these people," the official added. "A person without nationality has no right to talk about human values."


http://www.rferl.org/content/armenia-azerbaijan-stone-dreams-akram-aylisli/24890815.html
http://en.trend.az/news/politics/2116003.html
http://www.lenta.ru/articles/2013/02/05/stonedream/