In memory of diplomat and intellectual Ramiz Abutalibov Belated Obituary

On the first day of this year, Azerbaijan lost one of its most illustrious diplomats and public figures. It would be no exaggeration to add that the nation was also compelled to say a sad adieu to one of its most faithful and unassuming servants.

There is one school of thought which holds the view that it is never too late to pen an obituary, and since an obituary is different from a death notice, it cannot be belated.

The task of ours here is not to engage in an exercise determining the gradations of timeliness, but to pay tribute to an eminent figure in whose personality many shades of his country’s history and a quest for untrammelled emancipation were fixed with immutable clarity.

In addition to being an envoy, Ramiz Abutalibov was a man of letters, historian and eminent researcher of the legacy of the Azerbaijani Democratic Republic, which achieved so much during 23 months from 1918-20.

The now late-lamented hero of ours was a man imbued with a sense of history and destiny of his own country. Having spent the substantial part of his adult life in Paris and Moscow, he was a cosmopolitan, steeped in the knowledge of a global world that only those privileged to see the world outside the box and beyond the confines imposed by the repressive and controlling Soviet system were able to possess.

Yet he was not detached from his roots. Quite the contrary, his genius was the source of his main raison d’être. He probably believed in the timeless adage that only those who are driven by the exigencies of their nations can be of service to humanity.

The first Azerbaijani graduate of the prestigious Foreign Trade Academy based in Moscow, Abutalibov had a rare privilege, largely unknown to his compatriots, of working in the diplomatic service. During the Soviet epoch, there was no practical need for diplomats from constituent republics, as the external affairs were the preserve of Moscow.

But destiny ruled otherwise for our hero. The faculty of international organisations of the academy, where he studied, enabled him to be a candidate for the job at UNESCO. He passed the exam, and then was posted to Paris at a time when having first-hand experience of the West was one of the most exclusive honours any Soviet citizen could contemplate.

In addition to his two terms at UNESCO, which cumulatively amounted to 16 years, he was the head of the foreign relations department at the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Azerbaijan and the head of foreign delegations at the Supreme Council of Azerbaijan between 1980-84.

When the Soviet miscreation was on the cusp of inevitable transformation, he authored four books on the Armenian-Azerbaijani Nagorno-Karabakh conflict between 1989-92. This was a time when Azerbaijan was drowned in information warfare and had no access to the world. At this very time, he established the “Azerbaijan House” Association in Paris, one of the few diaspora entities in existence behind the iron curtain.

Born and bred during the Soviet age, Abutalibov was undoubtedly a product of the system, but at no point in his illustrious life, he was “Homo Soveiticus” or, to put it simply, a Soviet man. Having worked in the cockpit of worldwide cultural diplomacy at UNESCO in Paris, he had the privilege to see human existence beyond the walls of the Soviets. That privilege was not bestowed upon him by virtue of any form of patronage, but earned through hard work.

He was a fearless man. Had he not been such, he would not have dared to investigate the legacy of the First Republic. During his time in Paris, he managed to establish rapport with the descendants of those who left Azerbaijan in 1919 and never had a chance to return. It was a dangerous business. Given that he was working at UNESCO, it is not difficult to establish he must have been under surveillance; he still strived to work with those whose fathers were the enemies of Soviet ideology.

He had also the privilege of serving independent Azerbaijan as an Ambassador-at-large and the General Secretary of the Azerbaijani National Commission at UNESCO. He was one of the organisers of the process, as a result of which “Icheri Sheher” and “Mugham” were included in the lists of World Heritage Sites and Intangible Cultural Heritage, respectively.

He was a figure who almost transcended time. His personality and life embodied the three distinct stages in the history of Azerbaijan. Born in Soviet Azerbaijan, he was in some inexplicable way spiritually connected to the legacy of the Azerbaijani Democratic Republic and became one of its most distinguished scholars and exponents.

Somewhat infected by the excitement of history, despite working for the Soviet Empire, he fulfilled his lifelong quest to serve the national cause in a meaningful way, and was fortunate to see Azerbaijan independent and be a diplomat representing the Republic abroad.

Ramiz Abutalibov is, above all, the personification of faithfulness to his own nation and intellectualism of global scope. This is a rare combination associated with the chosen few. Ramiz Abutalibov was one of them.