On October 17, 2024, the Azerbaijan Cultural Center hosted a Master 1 class from the Paris School of International Relations and Political Science (ILERI). It was the perfect opportunity for Azerbaijan's ambassador to France, Leyla Abdullayeva, to present her country in the best possible light. However, it is reasonable to assume that she failed to mention the imprisonment and murder of political opponents of the regime she represents, as well as the war crimes and ethnic cleansing perpetrated by the latter against the Armenians.
Curiously, it is interesting to note that ILERI itself removed all traces of this visit from its social networks. No doubt it foresaw the emergence of criticism of this questionable decision to take its students to be seduced, and then photographed in a selfie, by the face of a bloody dictatorship in France.
Beyond its obvious indecency, this event raises the question of relativism in higher education establishments linked to international relations. For while it should be remembered that in February 2024, ILERI had given the floor at a conference to Hovhannes Guévorkian, the representative in France of the Republic of Artsakh, several questions arise:
- Were the students who visited the Azerbaijani ambassador in October 2024 present at Hovhannes Guévorkian's conference?
- Were the two events linked? Were they aimed at the same student audience?
- Were the ambassador's remarks qualified or even contradicted before, during or after the event by Ms. May Maalouf Monneau, the teacher who took the class to the Azerbaijan Cultural Center?
Academics often feel that, in order to deal fairly with a conflict situation, it is imperative to “take into account the arguments of each side”. However, this precaution - which in reality is merely a symptom of the fear of being judged as partisan - regularly leads “researchers” and “experts” to consider the reasons of each side in a conflict to be equivalent. Such a method actually leads them to forget about power relationships, the aggressors and the aggressed, the victims and the executioners. This posture is seriously problematic.
Giving the floor to the representative of a people expelled from their ancestral territory, and at the same time to the representative of the state that expelled them, amounts to equating these two discourses. Indirectly, such a method whitewashes the crimes of this state, since it offers it a space of expression for arguments accepted without being evaluated, which are confronted by those of the victims, who undergo the same treatment. In this way, Western research indulges in the illusion of understanding conflicts it has only scratched the surface of, while at the same time vindicating those who fabricate arguments to justify massacres and ethnic cleansing.
Giving the floor to the Azerbaijani ambassador in front of Master 1 students in International Relations is tantamount to allowing the pretexts devised by the Aliyev dictatorship, varnished in diplomatic language, to justify the expulsion of the indigenous Armenians of Nagorno-Karabakh, their dehumanization and its new territorial ambitions, to infuse themselves into their minds, and find an equivalence with Hovhannes Guévorkian's words (which they probably didn't even hear).
May Maalouf Monneau's reasons for taking her class to Leyla Abdullayeva are unknown. Is she close to the Azerbaijani diplomatic representation? Did she organize this event with the aim of subjecting her students to the rhetoric of a dictatorship, after having prepared them in advance? Was it a counterpart to Hovhannes Guévorkian's conference in February 2024? We tried to ask her about it, but got no answer.
