Monumental mistakes

Last August, a statue of Heydar Aliyev, who ruled Azerbaijan from 1993 to 2003, was erected along Mexico City's grand Paseo de la Reforma, in a park renamed the “Mexico-Azerbaijan Friendship Park.” Around the same time, the Azerbaijani government built a second monument in a different park in memory of Azeri villagers killed by Armenian forces in 1992; the plaque in front of the statue refers to the massacre as a “genocide.” Azerbaijan had renovated both public spaces at a cost of about $5.4 million.
The inauguration of the Aliyev monument was attended by several top Mexican government officials, including the mayor. But the Mexican public, then engrossed in a presidential election campaign, paid little attention to a statue of a man who once led a country 8,000 miles away.

When the nouveau riche attempt to use their money to buy respect and prestige, it often backfires. Such was the case of the Azerbaijani government’s effort to honor its former president. Because once Mexico City residents became aware of the statue that had risen in their midst, they saw the effort for what it was: an authoritarian government clumsily trying to buy influence and whitewash the legacy of a dictator.
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This past weekend it ended in humiliation for Azerbaijan, when city workers, guarded by 200 police in riot gear, loaded the monument onto a flatbed truck in the middle of the night and carted it away. “Now everybody talks about Azerbaijan, but in a bad way,” said Guillermo Osorno, a prominent journalist and member of a government commission appointed to study the monuments.

Aliyev's legacy is a complex one. Most Azeris credit him with leading their country, an oil-rich ex-Soviet republic wedged in between Russia and Iran, out of a deep crisis in the 1990s, when Azerbaijan's economy collapsed and the country lost a disastrous war with Armenia. Aliyev's steady hand put the country on a path to prosperity; the country enjoyed double-digit GDP growth for more than a decade. But he was also a ruthless dictator, true to his roots as a former head of Soviet Azerbaijan's KGB.

Azerbaijan is now led by Aliyev's son, Ilham, who has aggressively built up a cult of personality to his father. Heydar Aliyev's presence is ubiquitous in Azerbaijan. Posters and billboards of the ex-president look down at citizens everywhere, every city has a major street named after him, and there are more than 60 museums and cultural centers across the country that bear his name. In 2008, Baku State University created a “Department of Aliyev Studies.”

Azerbaijan's most convincing argument is that a deal is a deal: It's not Azerbaijan's fault that Mexicans didn't pay attention to the statue until after it was built. During my meeting with him, Mukhtarov said that he would not accept any outcome other than the statue staying where it was, and if Mexico City were to remove the monument, the embassy would take the matter to an “international court.” But since the statue was removed early Sunday morning, he seems to have softened his stance, telling the Russian press that he is working with the city to establish an Azeri cultural center, which would be the new home of the statue. The fate of the Khojaly “genocide” memorial is still an open question.