Jean-Pierre Guinhut is a former French diplomat. More specifically, he was French ambassador to Azerbaijan between 1997 and 2001. He succeeded Jean Perrin in this post (1992-1996). Like his predecessor, Jean-Pierre Guinhut cultivated a genuine fascination for Azerbaijan which, on his return to France, led him to join a central structure of the dictatorship's lobby.
Jean-Pierre Guinhut, like Jean Perrin, came to know the Azerbaijan of Heydar Aliyev, father of current President Ilham Aliyev, at a time when the country had been severely defeated in the First Nagorno-Karabakh War, and had lost control of Nagorno-Karabakh.
Publicly, therefore, the diplomat represented the position of France, a member of the Minsk Group. In April 1999, he delivered a letter to the former president of the dictatorship, first stating that meeting him was “a great honor”, and then revealing part of the letter's content, including that “Jacques Chirac also insisted on the return of Azerbaijani refugees from Nagorno-Karabakh to their lands”.
Jean-Pierre Guinhut also took advantage of his position in Azerbaijan to indulge his fascination for “Eastern culture”, and even published an article in the magazine “Azerbaijan International” in 2000 about the writings of the poet Nizami, now mobilized by the diplomacy of the Aliyev dictatorship as part of its soft-power policy, to promote the regime and thus clear it of its crimes against its people and the Armenians.
But Jean-Pierre Guinhut's actions as French ambassador to Azerbaijan didn't stop at cultural diplomacy, fine words and promises of cooperation, since in 1999 he also welcomed the Senate's exclusion of the question of recognition of the Armenian genocide from its agenda. At the time, he claimed that “removing the law on the Armenian genocide from the Senate's agenda is in France's interest”, no doubt out of fear of offending his new Azerbaijani friends.
Jean-Pierre Guinhut retired in 2010, after serving as a diplomat in Qatar (1975-76), Iran (1980-82; 1988-93), Libya (1982-85), the USA (1985-88; 2001-02) and Afghanistan (2002-2005). According to his LinkedIn profile, since that date he has been advisor to the owner of the Palais Bayram restaurant in Tunis, of which he is co-owner.
Nevertheless, back in France, Jean-Pierre Guinhut didn't forget Azerbaijan, and decided to get involved in one of its main lobbying structures in France: the Association des Amis de l'Azerbaïdjan, of which he was, as recently as 2018, a member of the Board of Directors.
In addition, he still attends events organized by the diplomatic representation of Ilham Aliyev's dictatorship. In 2013, he was present at the celebration of Heydar Aliyev's 90th birthday, whose memory he saluted alongside Jean Perrin, another great admirer of the despot, declaring according to AzerNews that he “was one of the most eminent and competent politicians, as well as a brilliant leader of the nation”.
Jean-Pierre Guinhut has direct links with key players in Azerbaijani influence in France, such as Shahla Aghalarova, whose troubled role on the bangs of events in New Caledonia in 2023 we mentioned earlier, as his Instagram profile shows, and also takes part in embassy events.
In October 2023, for example, he was present alongside Azerbaijan's ambassador to France, Leyla Abdullayeva, at a concert by pianist Elchin Shirinov, organized by the association Dialogue France-Azerbaïdjan.
When it comes to expressing his pro-Azerbaijani views, while Jean-Pierre Guinhut is more discreet than his former colleague Jean Perrin - who is said to be the creator of the Association des Amis de l'Azerbaïdjan - he is nonetheless a supporter of the Aliyev regime on its social networks. Thus, during and after the 44-Day War in October-November 2020, he relayed the biased Azerbaijani vision, which attempted, among other things, to focus public attention on the bombs falling in the Azerbaijani town of Barda, while Armenian civilians were beheaded by Azerbaijani forces, and a process of complete ethnic cleansing of the region's Armenian population was put in place by the dictatorship.
Similarly, in a similar effort at selective indignation and accusatory inversion, Jean-Pierre Guinhut relayed the arguments of Azerbaijani propagandists such as photographer Reza Deghati, according to whom the Armenians had perpetrated a “cultural genocide” in Nagorno-Karabakh, in a context where the Azerbaijanis were destroying all traces of the thousand-year-old Armenian presence in Nagorno-Karabakh.
He also shared and supported the Facebook post by Jérôme Lambert, an outspoken supporter of Ilham Aliyev and president of the Association des Amis de l'Azerbaïdjan, in December 2020, calling for the non-recognition of Nagorno-Karabakh's independence following the 44-Day War.
On November 2, 2024, Jean-Pierre Guinhut sat next to Leyla Abdullayeva, Azerbaijan's ambassador, at the “Victory Day” concert organized in Paris at the Salle Cortot to celebrate the military victory of November 2020. With the representatives of a tyrant, he celebrated the victory of racist nationalism and the total expulsion of a people from their ancestral territory.
