Last week, the city of Baku hosted a two-day, multilateral humanitarian forum organized by the government of Azerbaijan and the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO).
The forum, which was inaugurated by Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev and attended by more than 450 luminaries from 75 countries — including two former presidents,13 Nobel Prize laureates and 13 heads of international organizations — had as its theme multiculturalism and the pressing issue of migrants and displaced peoples in an increasingly unwelcoming and ethnophobic world.
The forum incorporated a wide range of disciplines, from politics and industry to academia and religious issues, and expressions and views from all stripes of society were given voice during six roundtable discussions that encompassed the topics of cultural diversity in humanitarian practice, the preservation of human capital in conditions of mass migration, the role of the communications industry in ensuring inter-civilizational dialogue, sustainable development within social evolution, molecular biology and ethical medical innovations, and the converging of technologies within the context of the 21st century.
But throughout the two-day meeting of great minds, there was one prevailing message that resounded over and over again: cultural, ethnic and religious diversity constitute an asset to modern societies, and those people or nations which would seek to stifle or eliminate such diversity are, in fact, extinguishing their own social and economic evolution.
It was a powerful message, especially considering the geopolitical environment in which it took place.
Azerbaijan — a Transcaucasian, predominantly Muslim, former Soviet republic on the Caspian Sea, bounded by Russia to the north, Georgia to the northwest, Armenia to the west, Iran to the south and Turkey on the northwest border of its Nakhchivan enclave — is clearly in the thick of both the global migrant crisis and the escalating tensions of the Middle East.
But while Azerbaijan has suffered dearly at the hands of its Armenia neighbors — who not only conducted an internationally recognized genocide in the Azeri region of Khojaly in 1992, but have intractably occupied Azerbaijani national territory in Nagorno-Karabakh for nearly a quarter of a century despite repeated United Nations resolutions mandating their immediate evacuation of the provinces — the country has, throughout its history, been a bastion of multicultural acceptance and religious tolerance.
In his welcoming speech, Aliyev spoke about Azerbaijan’s tradition of hospitality towards foreign cultures and ethnic groups — a fact which was reiterated four days later when Pope Francis was welcomed into Baku as he offered an open-air Mass in the city’s center, and when a close advisor of the president attended an Ashkenazi Rosh Hashanah service in a major hotel that same night, where he congratulated the local Jewish community on its new year celebration on behalf of the government.
(I attended not only the forum, but also that Rosh Hashanah dinner, and everyone present told me that they had never once experienced any religious persecution in Azerbaijan.)
True, Aliyev has been accused by foreign critics of taking a heavy hand against his opponents, and there have been allegations of his government cracking down on activists and critical journalists.
But there can be no denying that he won a landslide victory in the internationally monitored 2013 elections.
As one foreign diplomat accredited in the country pointed out in an interview with The News last week, Aliyev has wisely reinvested his nation’s oil dollars in infrastructure, education and industrial diversification, all of which have helped Azerbaijan to weather the current petroleum crisis, despite two dramatic devaluations of the manat in 2015.
Moreover, poverty, which was cited as 45 percent when the country first gained its independence from Russia in 1991, now stands at just 5 percent.
If Aliyev is a forceful ruler, he is also a benevolent one, who seems to sincerely care about his people — regardless of their ethnicity or religious leanings — and who has spearheaded his nation into a regional political and economic leader that has become a beacon of stability in a region that has known precious little of that commodity in recent history.
Azerbaijan, a country that has never had expansionist ambitions and which has never invaded another nation, is leading the region through example, showing that multiculturalism and religious tolerance can be the cornerstones of both social and economic development.
The forum sent a message of open-mindedness, mutual respect and peaceful coexistence.
Let us hope that its missive is heard and heeded by Azerbaijan’s turbulent neighbors.
Thérèse Margolis can be reached at therese.margolis@gmail.com.