When FK Qarabağ won the Azerbaijan championship in July 1993, the first season of the new
independent football league in the former Soviet republic, there were no celebrations.
Days earlier, their home town of Aghdam had fallen into the hands of occupying forces
from neighbouring Armenia after a five-year struggle, and the town’s inhabitants fled
east across the country to Azerbaijan’s major cities.
In the days that followed, the city was destroyed, razed to the ground by the Armenian army so
that it could never again become the hub of Turkic culture it had historically been.
Qarabag, meanwhile, became the nomads of Azerbaijani football, wandering from city to city, seeking
fans and a home of their own. By 2001, they had nowhere left to turn. Rudderless and broke,
the club solemnly faced up to its fate, and prepared to go to the wall.
Into that financial vacuum stepped a savior. The country’s autocratic president, former
Communist Party chief Heydar Aliyev, decreed that the club was too valuable to the nation
to be allowed to slide into oblivion, and arranged for Qarabag to be bailed out by the
state.
The club set up home in the country’s capital, Baku, and with the support of their benefactor
slowly hauled themselves up from the dust to become Azerbaijan’s premier footballing
force.
In 2014, they ended two decades of hurt and completed their remarkable resurrection, winning
the title for the first time since the league’s maiden season and entering the qualifying
rounds of the Champions League.
More titles followed. Victory in the Premier Liqa in 2018 was Qarabag’s fifth title on
the spin, and their dominance over the footballing landscape here is secured for the foreseeable
future.
But it’s in Europe where the club’s true calling lies. Qarabag qualified for the Europa
League group stage for the first time in 2014, coming within a disallowed goal of knocking
out Inter Milan and reaching the knockout rounds. Two more seasons in the continent’s
second competition followed, before the club achieved their holy grail in 2017 and won
a place in the group stages of the Champions League.
Qarabag’s obsession with Europe has its genesis in the sad facts of the club’s expulsion
from its homeland.
Since 1994, when a six-year war between Azerbaijan and Armenia was interrupted by a Russian-brokered
ceasefire, the Caspian Sea state has been separated from lands it considers to be its
birthright, the mountainous republic of Nagorno-Karabakh.
Nagorno-Karabakh – or Artsakh to its mostly Armenian inhabitants – became the subject
of hostilities between the Transcaucasian neighbours during the final years of the USSR,
when Armenians in Artsakh lobbied for independence from the Azerbaijan Soviet Socialist Republic.
Street protests degenerated into sickening violence between Armenians and Azerbaijanis
in both states, and as the Soviet Union finally dissolved, hundreds were killed in sickening
pogroms.
The expulsion of the last Azeri civilians from Aghdam in July 1993 was one of the final
and most decisive defeats of the conflict. Within months, Baku had fully relinquished
its control over Artsakh, ushering in a massive humanitarian crisis as refugees flooded east
from the occupied territories. A bitter hatred sustains between the two states, and neither
is prepared to soften its stance over the disputed mountains.
A propaganda battle rages, but Azerbaijan have one formidable weapon in the war of public
consciousness – FK Qarabag.
In reaching the Champions League last season, Azerbaijan sent a powerful message to the
rest of Europe; the Karabakh Mountains belong to Azerbaijan, not only in name, but in heritage.
As Qarabag took their story to Western Europe’s major capitals to face Chelsea, Roma and Atletico
Madrid, the world was awakened to one of history’s forgotten conflicts. Qarabag were eliminated
at the group stage, but the scale of Azerbaijan’s victory was incalculable.
So goes one side of the story…
In Armenia, the picture is different. Mountainous Karabakh is the historical home of hundreds
of thousands of native Armenians. The bloodline flows strongly through Karabakh’s valleys,
and the Champions League adventure enjoyed by the team from Aghdam broke the hearts of
Armenians living in the Karabakh capital Stepanakert and its seven surrounding provinces.
Whilst Qarabag enjoy the riches of competing at the highest level of European football,
Artsakh can’t even sustain a professional football league, denied membership of Uefa
and of Fifa and left out in the financial and political wilderness. It’s small wonder
that they struggle to share in the joy of Qarabag’s ascent. The bitterness between
Azerbaijan and Armenian shows no signs of going away any time soon.
Now, Qarabag find themselves back in Europe, this time in the Europa League. Tonight they
are back in London to face Arsenal. Cue more headlines about ‘the team from Azerbaijan’,
and more animosity in Transcaucasia about a side of the story that is simply not being
heard, or told.