Truth and Accountability League Condemns Western Participation in Azerbaijan’s “Western Azerbaijan Community” Propaganda Conference
Truth and Accountability League (TAAL) condemns the participation of American and European academics and representatives in the so-called “International Conference on Cultural Heritage and the Right of Return,” hosted in Baku by the Western Azerbaijan Community (WAC). As TAAL has previously stated, the WAC is not a civil society initiative but a state-aligned political construct designed to advance Azerbaijan’s territorial claims against the sovereign Republic of Armenia under the guise of heritage, reconciliation, and human rights.
By participating in this conference, Western individuals lent credibility to a narrative that reframes aggression, ethnic cleansing, and revisionism as victimhood, while erasing Armenia’s internationally recognized borders and the documented displacement and genocide of Armenians from Artsakh.
The second panel of the conference was moderated by Klaus-Peter Ralph Jürgens, identified as a United Kingdom representative. The third panel was moderated by Jakub Korejba, affiliated with the Polish think tank AVIM. Additional Western participants included Michael Martin Gunther, an American academic long associated with narratives favorable to Turkish and Azerbaijani state positions. While these individuals may not be acting in official governmental capacities, their participation as Western academics and representatives provided exactly what this event was designed to extract: legitimacy, optics, and plausible deniability for a state propaganda effort.
This matters. Azerbaijan’s claim to a fictional “Western Azerbaijan” is not an abstract academic debate. It is a political project that mirrors historical patterns of territorial revisionism and demographic engineering. The language of “right of return” is being deliberately weaponized to invert reality and prepare the ground for future coercion against Armenia.
TAAL notes the silence of Western governments and institutions that routinely pressure Armenia to capitulate in the name of “peace,” while aggressively bothsiding Azerbaijan’s genocide of Armenians in Artsakh, its ongoing threats, and its campaign of intimidation. The United States, the European Union, and their partners have had much to say when Armenia is told to concede. They have nothing to say when a farce like this is staged in Baku with Western participation.
Would these same actors remain silent if Russia convened an international conference claiming that parts of France constituted “Western Russia”? Would they applaud academic panels arguing that Greece is “Western Türkiye”? The answer is obvious. Armenia is treated differently because it is perceived as expendable.
TAAL calls on Western academics, institutions, and policymakers to publicly disavow the Western Azerbaijan Community and to stop laundering authoritarian territorial claims through the language of culture, heritage, and human rights. Participation without context is not neutrality. It is complicity.
Truth and Accountability League will continue to document, expose, and challenge disinformation campaigns that threaten Armenian sovereignty, history, and survival, regardless of how respectably they are packaged or how many Western credentials are placed on stage.
