Epress.am News from Armenia
The Agos newspaper (Turkish-Armenia weekly) has met with their Azerbaijan correspondent, Arzu Geybullayeva, after they (Agos) published news regarding her receiving threats for working with Agos newspaper and becoming the target of a systematic hate campaign in her country.
Turkish original article published October 15, 2014
(Translated from Turkish to English by David Leupold)
“Last week, we had published the news in regards to Arzu Geybullayeva, our Azerbaijan correspondent, who received threats for working with the Agos newspaper and became the target of a systematic hate campaign in her country. As the news elicited strong interest, an increased awareness has been reached in public opinion for the safety of Geybullayeva’s life.
When we asked Geybullayeva for her opinion about news defaming Agos as the “enemy’s newspaper” and her as an “Armenian bastard”, she confirmed that some parts of society regard her as a traitor who sold off her homeland, nation and history.
“Obviously, I’m a traitor because in the eyes of those who prefer to remain in the dark it is treason to work in Turkey at an Armenian newspaper. Besides, I am also a traitor because they claim that I have not written anything on Karabakh, yet, in spite of the fact, there exists a sufficient numbers of essays and articles which I have written,” says the journalist with disobedience. She continues; “20 years have passed since the war. When the war started in 92’ I was nine years old. What I can recollect resembles pretty much old black-and-white movies, a bit blurry and fragmented. I’ve learned about the Karabakh war through history books. The Armenians are a terrible scary race, that have deprived us from Azerbaijani territories, that our army failed to protect its own borders, and that dozens of innocent people were killed mercilessly – I have read all this. Our state sought to ingrain this into our brains. Personally, I have only learned one lesson from what I have seen, watched, and heard: such a pain must never occur again.”
Regarding the Khojali tragedy which constitutes another important historical rupture between Azerbaijan and Armenia, Arzu Geybullayeva stated as follows: “Yes, it is a tragedy, because close to 600 fellow citizens were killed, they died. They were tormented before they died and froze to death while trying to escape this nightmare. What happened that night was not forgotten. It never will. Every year, we and the world are reminded of it through the photos of our deceased citizens. For me, Khojali is a day in our history when our people were killed in a horrific way. They lived through this. To deny this is in itself a crime. Anyways, I have never mentioned anything about denying and forgetting our past. My treason is obviously to seek for peace. To not live through these again.”
The correspondent further stressed that in Azerbaijan there is no willingness to acknowledge the truth that Azerbaijan also killed citizens and that the other side also suffered from the war. She utters her stance as follows: “I finally understood that hate speech leads to nowhere. For that reason, I tried to get involved in dialogue with the other side. I wanted to learn how Armenians learn about the war. Not in an attempt to prove who’s innocent or who’s guilty, but to understand.”
Arzu Geybullayev, who believes that “we should strive to write the history of our own period, not to live in what others have written for us, concludes her words by raising a question to those who targeted her, “In your insults and humiliations I might be referred as a traitor, well so what about you? Who said you are heroes in the first place?”