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OC Media has claimed to have obtained “leaked documents” showing that Azerbaijan’s Presidential Administration has coordinated and funded the international rollout of the ‘Western Azerbaijan’ narrative — a campaign that claimed to be a humanitarian association.
Azerbaijani officials have often used the term “Western Azerbaijan” to refer to parts of Armenia’s sovereign territory, prompting Yerevan to reaffirm that no such entity has ever existed and cannot exist within Armenia. PM Pashinyan has rejected the narrative on numerous occasions.
Leaked documents from the Azerbaijani Government, obtained by OC Media, show that the discourse is closely coordinated and supported by the Presidential Administration of Azerbaijan, despite being fronted by the Western Azerbaijan Community (WAC).
‘The Azerbaijani government seeks to keep nationalist fervor constantly alive’, Altay Goyushov, a visiting scholar at Paris Institute of Political Studies and expert on the Azerbaijani civic space, told OC Media. ‘It serves as a tool to mobilise public opinion and distract people from social issues and their deprived rights. Moreover, it acts as a kind of Damocles’ sword to intimidate Armenia’.
The documents show that the Presidential Administration directly financed and supervised the campaign — organising conferences, hiring communications consultants, and producing messaging materials. The names, dates, and contracts in the files align with publicly available records. Although the WAC was originally registered as a refugee initiative in the late 1980s, it remained largely inactive until 2022, when the Azerbaijani government reactivated it, according to the report.
Neither the WAC nor the Presidential Administration of Azerbaijan responded to OC Media’s requests for comment, according to the report.