STEPANAKERT. – Azerbaijan President Ilham Aliyev, speaking about Stepan Shaumian, the “ringleader of the bandit squad [as Aliyev had put it],” forgets that his own father, [former Azerbaijan President, the late] Heydar Aliyev was a member of this “bandit”—as Ilham Aliyev had put it—political party [i.e. the Communist Party] for numerous years.

Davit Babayan, Spokesperson of the Nagorno-Karabakh Republic (NKR) President, told the aforementioned to Armenian news-NEWS.am. He noted this reflecting on the incumbent Azerbaijan president’s statement regarding the “Azerbaijani” place names in Karabakh. 

Babayan noted that the leadership of present-day Azerbaijan has no right to make judgments on historical place names because the country of Azerbaijan did not exist as such until 1918, and this name was copied from an Iranian place name.

“To this day,  the [place] names in Azerbaijan are either translated from Armenian, or are Iranian, or Arabic, or Dagestani,” Babayan added. 

In his words, such “forgetfulness” by the Azerbaijan president bespeaks not solely the absence of an ethnic identity, but also the absence of political and ethical grounds.

To note, Stepan Shaumian was an Armenian Bolshevik revolutionary and a politician who was active throughout the Caucasus.