Azerbaijan’s Foreign Ministry (MFA) has demanded that New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani remove a statement commemorating the 111th anniversary of the Armenian Genocide, calling the mayor’s recognition of the systematic murder of 1.5 million Armenians by the Ottoman Empire “inflammatory” and “historically false.”
The condemnation, issued by MFA spokesperson Aykhan Hajizada from Baku, nearly 5,800 miles from New York City Hall, marks the latest attempt by the regime of Ilham Aliyev to police speech in foreign capitals about both the Armenian Genocide and Azerbaijan’s more recent ethnic cleansing of Armenians from Artsakh (Nagorno-Karabakh).
Mamdani issued his statement on April 24 to mark Armenian Genocide Remembrance Day. His message read in full: “Today marks the 111th anniversary of the Armenian Genocide. As we honor the 1.5 million Armenians murdered by the Ottoman Empire across modern-day Turkey, Syria, and Armenia, we must refuse to let history repeat itself. In 2020, the military forces of Azerbaijan and Turkey attacked the Armenian population in Nagorno-Karabakh. In 2023, Azerbaijan expelled over 100,000 Armenians from Nagorno-Karabakh, continuing the genocidal campaign that had begun over 100 years prior. On this day of remembrance, we reaffirm the right of the Armenian people, and all people, to freedom, safety, and self-determination.”
Hajizada, posting on X, accused Mamdani of “spreading misinformation” and “deepening division through politically motivated and historically false statements.” He claimed that Azerbaijan in 2020 “acted within its internationally recognized sovereign territory, in line with international law and UN Security Council resolutions,” and described the September 2023 offensive against the Armenian population of Artsakh as “counter-terror measures” that resulted in the “restoration of Azerbaijan’s constitutional order following three decades of illegal occupation.”
The spokesperson rejected the use of the word “expulsion” and claimed that Armenian residents were “offered reintegration, full equal rights, and security guarantees.” His statement closed with a demand that Mamdani’s commemoration “be removed without delay.”
The reality on the ground tells a different story. In September 2023, more than 100,000 ethnic Armenians, virtually the entire indigenous population of Artsakh, were forced to flee in less than a week following a 24-hour Azerbaijani military assault that came after a nine-month blockade engineered to starve the region into submission.
The International Court of Justice had ordered Azerbaijan to lift that blockade in February 2023. Baku refused. Former International Criminal Court chief prosecutor Luis Moreno Ocampo, in a legal opinion published before the offensive, concluded that the blockade itself constituted genocide under the 1948 Genocide Convention. The “reintegration” Hajizada references was offered at gunpoint, after the bombardment, and after a generation of Armenians had watched their neighbors killed, abducted, and tortured by Azerbaijani forces.
The accusation that Mamdani “ignores ethnic cleansing and massacres against hundreds of thousands of Azerbaijanis” inverts the historical record. And Hajizada’s invocation of “destruction of cultural and religious heritage” arrives from a government that bulldozed the medieval Armenian cemetery of Djulfa, smashing thousands of khachkars in one of the most thoroughly documented acts of cultural erasure of the 21st century, and which has continued to demolish Armenian churches, monasteries, and inscriptions across occupied Artsakh since 2020.
Mamdani’s statement, in linking 1915 to 2020 and 2023, did precisely what Azerbaijan’s foreign ministry insists cannot be said aloud. That a regime nearly 6,000 miles from New York City believes it has the standing to instruct an American mayor on which atrocities he may commemorate is itself the clearest confirmation that the mayor’s framing was correct.
