Tarlan Ahmadov (left) with Maine state and county officials during a junket to Azerbaijan last spring. photo/courtesy Government of Azerbaijan
Maine Democrats cover up ethnic cleansing
The harassment happens so often that Armenians around here have a name for it: the Tarlan zoom and boom.
Paul Proudian, a member of the Armenian Cultural Association of Maine, gave a talk at Colby College about 10 years ago for a forum on Maine’s immigrant communities. During the intermission, Tarlan Ahmadov, an immigrant from the neighboring nation of Azerbaijan, zoomed up to Proudian, “got in my face and said, ‘Armenians are responsible for the Khojaly genocide.’ Then he turned around and walked away.”
Boom.
“The weird part was, he had his two kids with him,” Proudian added, “who he introduced” — à la Inigo Montoya in The Princess Bride — before accusing Proudian’s people of a 1992 atrocity.
The killing of several hundred Azeri civilians by Armenian and Soviet forces at Khojaly during what’s called the First Nagorno-Karabakh War, which lasted from 1988 to 1994, is more commonly referred to as a massacre, not an act of genocide as the term is defined by international law. Nagorno-Karabakh, called Artsakh by Armenians, is a mountainous region in western Azerbaijan, near the Armenian border, historically peopled by Christians of Armenian descent, but also remarkable for its religious and cultural diversity in past centuries.
In the early 1920s, as the borders of the nascent Soviet Union were being drawn, Karabakh was made part of Muslim-majority, Azeri-speaking Azerbaijan despite its distinctly Armenian ethnic and cultural identity. The Soviet system — which promoted, and when necessary, enforced peace and cooperation between its republics — kept tensions between Azeris and Armenians in check, and the groups integrated and lived in relative harmony for over half a century.
As the Soviet Union began to fray in the late ’80s, so too did Azeri-Armenian relations, and Armenians gained control of Karabakh and surrounding provinces as a result of that first war, which claimed tens of thousands of combatant and civilian lives on both sides and forced over a million Azeris and Armenians to flee their homes.
A long and fruitless series of peace negotiations led by the United States, Russia and France dragged on for 25 years. With only about a third of its rival’s population and size, landlocked Armenia — whose borders with Azerbaijan and its close ally, Turkey, were closed — struggled during this period. Azerbaijan, flush with money from oil and gas drilling in the Caspian Sea, spent billions on weapons and on an extensive influence campaign in the U.S. and Europe. In addition to lobbying and public-relations work, this campaign involved widespread bribery, including free trips and lavish gifts — what investigators have called “caviar diplomacy.”
Little Portland, Maine, with its negligible influence on affairs in the Caucasus north of Iran, seems like an odd place to invest resources promoting the regional interests of Azerbaijan. Armenians fleeing the 1915-17 genocide and earlier attacks perpetrated by Turkey’s predecessor, the Ottoman Empire, settled here in significant numbers, particularly in the Bayside neighborhood downtown, greatly contributing to the city’s growth and seeding generations of Armenian American locals. [See “‘Atrocity’ in the Forest City,” Nov. 2009, for more of this history.]
“This is a gentle community,” said Proudian, who grew up in Westbrook during the 1960s and ’70s. “We held our picnics, had our dances, sat around and told Armenian jokes. … It’s about as laidback a bunch of Armenians as you’re gonna get.”
Ahmadov’s provocations were startling and unprecedented. “There’s never been anything like Tarlan in this community,” said Proudian. “He’s very confrontational and in-your-face. The community felt threatened by what this guy was doing. It’s not overstating it to say people are just shocked and dumbfounded by this stuff around here. They’re not used to that sort of confrontation.”
Five years ago, Ahmadov stepped up his efforts to demonize Armenians in several ways.
Gerard Kiladjian, a hotel executive who founded the Armenian Cultural Association here in 2003, recalled the winter day in early 2020 when a truck carrying an electronic billboard displaying the message “Armenians killed the Azeris in Khojaly” (or words to that effect) circled the city’s streets for hours. That evening, in Monument Square, a small crowd gathered to hear Ahmadov speak about the alleged “genocide” in Khojaly and watch slickly produced videos about it on huge LED screens rolled in for the rally.
“We were floored,” said Kiladjian. “This is not small-town money. This is not small-town thinking. This is not how we operate in Maine. So where is it coming from?”
That fall, as the COVID-19 pandemic plunged civilization into chaos, Azerbaijan broke the fragile ceasefire and launched the Second Nagorno-Karabakh War with military support from Turkey and weapons primarily purchased from Israel, including armed drones that proved decisive during the six-week conflict which ended with Azerbaijan regaining control of most of this territory.
A few months later, Ahmadov wrote and submitted a resolution to the Portland City Council recognizing Feb. 26, the date of the massacre, as “Khojaly Remembrance Day.” Passed unanimously, it called the killings a “genocide,” the “perpetrators” of which “are still at large and have not been brought to justice yet.” Similar proclamations had been adopted with little notice or debate by other U.S. cities in previous years, including Boston, but Armenian Americans were catching on and pushing back.
In March of 2021, Boston Mayor Marty Walsh rescinded the Khojaly resolution his city passed the month prior and publicly apologized to his Armenian constituents. Portland Mayor Kate Snyder did the same, apologizing for “the pain and harm that the issuance of this proclamation has caused” and pledging closer review of future resolutions “for historical accuracy and unintended consequences.”
“It was a war crime, but it was not a genocide,” Proudian told the Portland Press Herald at the time. “To call [Khojaly] a genocide is clearly an attempt to diminish the Armenian experience here and create false equivalence where none exists.”
Ahmadov, founder of the Azerbaijan Society of Maine, was then working for Catholic Charities as its coordinator of refugee services. “There is no political motivation,” he told the Press Herald that February. “This is rather the remembrance of the victims. We are educating the public and making awareness of this tragedy and the loss of innocent people.”
According to state-affiliated media in Azerbaijan, passage of the Portland resolution had been a historic milestone. “The statement said the 29th anniversary of the Khojaly genocide, the number of Azerbaijanis killed and the tragedy was one of the greatest massacres against humanity,” Axar’s website reported, and credited Ahmadov by name for initiating the proclamation. “It was noted that the Khojaly massacre is one of the crimes against humanity in the world. The adoption of such a statement in the US state of Maine can be considered the greatest success of American Azerbaijanis on the eve of the anniversary of the Khojaly genocide.”
After Snyder rescinded the resolution, Ahmadov told the Herald, “It was heartbreaking. … I was not only upset by [Snyder’s] actions, but also about what some people in the Armenian community in Maine put on the Facebook. It was just heartbreaking how they were bragging and bullying all of us.”
“There’s a certain gaslighting quality to everything he does,” Proudian said of Ahmadov. In fact, while the Second Nagorno-Karabakh War was raging in the fall of 2020, Ahmadov was waging a social-media hate campaign directed at supporters and sympathizers of the Armenian cause.
In since-deleted posts recovered by far-right news website The Maine Wire, Ahmadov characterized celebrity Kim Kardashian West as a supporter of “terrorism” for her $1 million donation to ArmeniaFund, a humanitarian nonprofit, and castigated Bill Belichick after the football coach called for “action against Turkey and Azerbaijan for their unprovoked and deadly attacks on Armenians.”
“[S]hame on you and your turkophobic [sic] statement,” Ahmadov wrote, tagging Belichick on Twitter. “Work on your business and do not put your nose into somethings [sic] you have no idea [sic].” In that post and others, Ahmadov referred to ordinary Armenians living in Azerbaijan as “occupiers” and “aggressors.”
One would think someone who publicly condemns an entire ethnic group as occupiers — during a war launched against them in violation of international agreements — would be disqualified from any position responsible for helping refugees, including members of that group, resettle in Maine. And Ahmadov did leave his job at Catholic Charities in 2022, but he left to work for a new employer: me and you, fellow Mainer.
Ahmadov was hired to head the Division of Programs at the Bureau of Employment Services, part of the Maine Department of Labor, three years ago. While employed by the State of Maine, Ahmadov acted as an agent of the authoritarian Azerbaijani government here and abroad.
Last May, Ahmadov took three state lawmakers and a county probate judge on an all-expenses-paid tour of his homeland, including areas in Karabakh ethnically cleansed of Armenians the previous fall. The elected officials from Maine posed for selfies amid the war-ravaged ruins and posted shots of the exotic desserts they were served in fancy restaurants. They met with top government ministers and other officials in gleaming marble rooms, then parroted Azeri propaganda justifying war crimes.
For example, they praised the “restoration and reconstruction works” in recently depopulated Karabakh, where ongoing destruction of Armenian cultural and religious heritage sites has been decried worldwide. The Maine delegation also “condemned the acts of vandalism committed by Armenians against cultural monuments and mosques in the [Karabakhi] city of Shusha during the occupation,” state media reported.
There is no free press in Azerbaijan, but state outlets extensively covered every stop of their tour, publishing scores of photographs and giving readers and viewers throughout the Caucasus every reason to believe Mainers are delighted the Armenian occupation is over.
Outraged Armenian Mainers pushed back again, challenging the lawmakers and judge to justify the trip and their statements in support of ethnic cleansing that first starved and then forcibly expelled over 100,000 Armenians from Karabakh over the course of a few days in 2023.
None of the officials publicly addressed the war crimes or their constituents’ objections to the trip, though some dessert posts and selfies were taken down from social media. None offered an apology, and two of the lawmakers refused to respond whatsoever — allegedly at Ahmadov’s direction.
Instead of a rebuke, Ahmadov got a more powerful position in state government and a raise.
Last fall, one of the lawmakers who joined the junket to Azerbaijan, former South Portland mayor and current Democratic state representative Deqa Dhalac, sponsored a bill to establish an Office of New Americans (ONA), which Democratic Gov. Janet Mills had first sought to create in 2023 by executive order, to help employers find qualified immigrant workers. Mills then personally selected Ahmadov to be the office’s first director, at a salary of over $110,000.
This time the outrage was too hard to ignore. Local Armenian leaders wrote letters to Mills and to Hannah Pingree — director of the governor’s Office of Policy Innovation and the Future, which oversees the ONA — protesting the hire and detailing Ahmadov’s history of antagonism and unprofessional behavior toward their people.
“If you’re instigating hatreds for other groups, then you don’t have the right people in position,” Kiladjian told The Bollard. “We expect Governor Mills to have systems in place to vet people properly — certainly in situations where immigrants are involved.”
On April 1, three months into the job, Ahmadov resigned, citing “health reasons.” Neither Mills nor Pingree (daughter of longtime Democratic Congresswoman Chellie Pingree) said a peep in public about the ethnic cleansing that had made his hire scandalous.
By mid-April, having apparently regained his health, Ahmadov was reinstated as Director of Programs at the Department of Labor bureau, a position for which he was paid over $103,000 in 2024, according to state records and reporting by The Maine Wire, which broke that news and has covered the meltdown at the immigration office with zeal.
Ahmadov did not respond to interview requests for this story. Neither did the legislators who accepted his trip to Azerbaijan a year ago: Democratic state senator and former Portland mayor and city councilor Jill Duson, Lewiston Democratic state representative Mana Abdi, and Dhalac.
Mills and Pingree also failed to respond, though The Bollard did view a message Pingree sent to Westbrook City Council leader Anna Astvatsaturian Turcotte, a prominent member of the Armenian community, in response to her concern about Ahmadov’s reinstatement last month.
In The Maine Wire’s report on Ahmadov’s return, it quoted remarks Pingree made during an ONA advisory board meeting praising his contribution to the new office during his short tenure, thanking him for his work, and reiterating that he’d resigned for “medical reasons.”
Privately, to Turcotte, Pingree wrote, “Anna, I understand why you might be frustrated about the DOL position. … I took your concerns very seriously and to heart. And I absolutely don’t agree with what [Ahmadov has] said or how he’s treated Armenians. I don’t condone his actions.” Pingree implied that “union and state employee rules that I’m not expert on” may have forced the state to rehire Ahmadov despite his blatant bigotry and foreign-government ties.
As a child, Turcotte was forced to flee Azerbaijan with her family in 1989, when riots and violence targeting Armenians erupted in the capital, Baku, and elsewhere. Her response to Pingree follows, in full:
“I was sexually assaulted at 11 years old at the height of massacres of Armenians organized by [Ahmadov’s] puppeteer, the government of Azerbaijan. The assault occurred [sic] by the same type of smiley Tarlan that you praise in your meetings: shady, hateful and gross. NO union rules or first amendment [sic] rights forced YOU to praise him. I’m not frustrated. I’m fearful of what people like him feel they can do to me and my children because people in power play cute politics and afford him unlimited impunity.”
“Civil” wars
In his tweet blasting Belichick, Ahmadov included two hashtags that help explain what’s been fueling Azeri anger against Armenians: #KarabakhisAzerbaijan and #1MillionAzerbaijaniRefugees.
The area in and around Karabakh declared the Republic of Artsakh by Armenians at the height of their territorial control 30 years ago constituted about 14 percent of Azerbaijan. By way of comparison, in last year’s dystopian blockbuster Civil War, Texas and California have teamed up against the rest of the United States. Toss in Arizona and you’ve got about 14 percent of the U.S.A. If those states, citing their deep cultural and historic connections with Mexico, decided to go rogue and try to join our southern neighbor, how do you imagine most of the rest of this country would react?
Now imagine hundreds of thousands of Texans and Californians who don’t want to be part of the “Western Forces” being forced to leave their jobs, homes and communities and make new lives from scratch in other states or countries. The figure of a million Azeri refugees, like the body count at Khojaly, is frequently inflated for partisan purposes, but most independent assessments peg it around 750,000 during the first war, and the suffering of all those civilians was certainly real and terrible.
So too was indifference to that suffering on the part of Armenian rebels in Karabakh. In his deeply reported 2003 book, Black Garden: Armenia and Azerbaijan through Peace and War, Thomas de Waal describes “the terrifying blind spot” in the thinking of early Artsakh independence leader Igor Muradyan “and that of many Armenians.”
“In telling his story” about Artsakh’s late ’80s campaign for independence, “Muradyan made absolutely no reference to the position of Azerbaijan, or what would be the reaction of the approximately 40,000 Azerbaijanis of Karabakh” — about a quarter of the region’s population back then.
“‘So, what about the Azerbaijanis?’” Muradyan was asked at the time. “Did he make no effort to consult with them or ask them their opinions?
“Muradyan’s gaze hardened at this question,” de Waal wrote. “‘Do you want to know the truth?’ he replied. ‘I will tell you the truth. We weren’t interested in the fate of those people. Those people were the instruments of power, instruments of violence over us for many decades, many centuries, even. We weren’t interested in their fate, and we’re not interested now.”
Blind nationalism and intransigence by both sides stymied negotiations for peace and reconciliation after 1994. But the fact remains that by launching the Second Nagorno-Karabakh War in 2020, Azerbaijan broke the ceasefire established after a deadly 2016 conflict between the two sides. And prior to bombing and forcing the remaining 100,000-plus Armenians to flee for their lives in the fall of 2023, Azerbaijan blockaded the only functional road into the area for nine months, preventing food, medicine and other essential supplies from reaching civilians there.
In an August 2023 report by Luis Moreno Ocampo, a former prosecutor for the International Criminal Court, he called Azerbaijan’s blockade “an ongoing Genocide against 120,000 Armenians living in Nagorno-Karabakh.” And he confirmed that the entire populace had reason to fear genocide. In justifying the expense of deploying peacekeepers to the region, Russian officials had cited the imperative to “prevent the mass death of the civilian population of Nagorno-Karabakh,” Ocampo reported.
Speaking on a Cambridge University student podcast this March, Dr. Nariné Ghazaryan, a professor of international and European law at Radboud University in The Netherlands, said, “without international guarantees, without the presence of international peacekeeping forces, everybody knew that no Armenians can live [in Karabakh], because the record just showed from the last years that a defenseless Armenian in the arms of the Azeri army is a dead Armenian.
“And that’s what happened,” Ghazaryan continued. “We ended up with the blitz war in September 2023 which led to ethnic cleansing in Nagorno-Karabakh — accepted by the European Union.”
And by elected officials representing Maine and the United States abroad, including lawmakers who were once refugees themselves, Abdi and Dhalac.
Despicable Him
Unlike European countries, which have increasingly relied on oil and gas piped from Azerbaijan since Russia invaded Ukraine, the motivation of Maine Democrats to countenance war crimes is less clear. For some members of Ahmadov’s junket, it really may have just been about a free vacation.
Cumberland County Judge of Probate Paul Aranson joined the delegation. The Democrat, who was Cumberland County’s district attorney for most of the 1980s and made two unsuccessful runs for the Maine House before being elected probate judge in 2018, cannot be reached by phone or e-mail at his county office. In a 2018 campaign video posted to his Facebook page, he said, “When I was a cantor, I’ve done everything from baby namings to weddings, bar mitzvahs, to funerals and Holocaust memorials, so I’ve seen life from the beginning to the end, and I’ve seen how it has impacted people — I’m very sensitive to that.”
Kiladjian said he spoke with Aranson by phone after his return from Azerbaijan and the judge told him he’d accepted the free trip because he’s long been interested in the region’s history and is a friend of Ahmadov’s. Kiladjian said the judge’s presence on the junket was disturbing, but “at the end of the day, the other politicians was what was the bigger issue, because they’re public officials who influence policy.”
“I don’t think that Duson, Dhalac and Abdi have been forthright about this,” said Proudian, who was among three local Armenians, including Kiladjian, who met with Duson after her trip last spring. “It was far from a productive meeting,” Proudian said. “It was actually unpleasant. But she did meet. The other two [Abdi and Dhalac] have not responded.”
According to Proudian, Duson told them her fellow lawmakers “freaked out” when they got letters from Armenian constituents upset about the junket. “They called Tarlan to find out what they should do,” Duson had said. “Tarlan said ignore it, which they did.”
“I think the public needs to hear explicitly from them what their relationship is with Azerbaijan,” Proudian continued. “They had meetings with government officials at which promises were made — ‘Let’s stay in touch…’ If there was some quid pro quo, we need to know what that is, especially in light of Azerbaijan’s corruption. They cultivate [influence and connections] locally; usually naïve politicians who love a free trip somewhere.”
Like Democratic Congressman Henry Cuellar of Texas, who was treated to a similar tour years ago. A couple weeks before the Maine delegation flew off last May, Cuellar and his wife, Imelda, were indicted by the Justice Department for bribery, unlawful foreign influence and money laundering connected to payments they allegedly received from an Azerbaijani oil company in exchange for the congressman’s support of Azeri causes. The Cuellars’ criminal trial is pending.
As with the Maine delegation, lawmakers in Texas were pulled into Azerbaijan’s web of influence through free trips to that unfree country, and support for resolutions condemning the Khojaly massacre were part of the payback. Cuellar tried (and failed) to cut U.S. aid to Armenia in 2020, and allegedly pressured the Obama administration to take a harder line against the country while “trying to insert language favorable to Azerbaijan into legislation,” the New York Times reported.
In 2013, a Houston-based nonprofit called the Turquoise Council of Americans and Eurasians took 10 members of Congress on an all-expenses-paid trip to Baku, which Maine’s delegation also visited. In a 2024 article for Texas Monthly, “What Azerbaijan Wants From Texas Politicians,” Christopher Hooks notes that the Organized Crime and Corruption Project, an investigative journalism group, found the lawmakers “were lavished with gifts from their hosts,” including “hand-woven carpets, crystal tea sets, silk scarves, and DVDs praising the country’s president.” The head of the Turquoise Council was subsequently indicted on federal charges and pleaded guilty to concealing the true source of funds for that trip: the State Oil Company of the Azerbaijan Republic, which is largely controlled by the president, Ilham Aliyev.
New York City Mayor Eric Adams, two of his aides and his chief fundraiser have also been implicated in Azerbaijan’s caviar diplomacy, accused by federal prosecutors of accepting trips in exchange for favors and influence. The junkets, allegedly taken to “foster economic development and share best practices between communities,” according to the city, were funded by the State Committee on Work with Diaspora of the Republic of Azerbaijan.
According to The Maine Wire, Rep. Dhalac’s financial disclosure to the Maine Ethics Commission lists the visit to Azerbaijan as a “cultural exchange trip” paid for by the “fund to support Azerbaijan diaspora.” Sen. Duson’s disclosure “similarly lists the junket but describes the payor as ‘Fund for Support Azerbaijani Diaspora,’” The Wire reported.
It appears the Maine lawmakers joined Ahmadov’s tour knowing the government of Azerbaijan was paying the bills. During their meeting with Duson, she “explicitly said it was the government of Azerbaijan acting through Tarlan that had financed it,” Proudian said.
It’s not always about what politicians in the pay of Azerbaijan and its allies dofor the country; sometimes it’s about what they don’t do — like not publicly talking about war crimes against Armenians.
In the federal indictment against Mayor Adams, prosecutors claim a Turkish official messaged an Adams staff member, “noting that Armenian Genocide Remembrance Day was approaching, and repeatedly asked the Adams staffer for assurances that Adams would not make any statement about the Armenian Genocide. … The Adams staffer confirmed that Adams would not make a statement about the Armenian Genocide. Adams did not make such a statement.”
If anything good for Mainers resulted from the delegation’s trip to Azerbaijan last spring, none of them have announced it publicly. But the lawmakers had plenty to crow about while overseas.
The Azeri-Press Agency (APA) quoted Dhalac praising government efforts to clear mines and rebuild cities so Azeris can repopulate Nagorno-Karabakh. “The visit to the liberated territories of Azerbaijan, and the destruction we witnessed there aroused feelings of sorrow in us and at the same time unique impressions,” Dhalac said, according to the APA. “I especially want to talk about the restoration and reconstruction works carried out by the Azerbaijani government in Shusha, Lachin, and other liberated territories over the past 4 years. Of course, the government is doing its best for the return of internally displaced persons to their homes as soon as possible.”
The same APA report quotes Duson enthusing about what Azerbaijan called its “green energy transition initiatives” as it prepared to host the annual United Nations climate conference last November (COP29), including a big solar power station U.S. companies can bid to construct through an “auction” process.
“The significance of your country hosting this conference indicates that Azerbaijan, rich in mineral deposits, attaches great importance to this problem [of climate change],” Duson is quoted as having said. “Naturally, we are interested in collaborating with your country on green energy and renewable energy sources, as well as in the field of advanced technologies. On the other hand, I believe that there are ample opportunities for significant partnerships, whether it be in combating climate change or in education, culture, agriculture, and other areas.”
“It was OK for me that they went to Azerbaijan,” Turcotte said. “Perhaps there was a reason for them to do that, like some sort of an exchange. But then they went to this empty territory, which was ethnically cleansed literally seven months before. To us, it’s like you went to Auschwitz and danced on the graves of our dead and posted photos.”
Like Duson, Turcotte is a Democrat, and in the small world of local party officeholders, they know each other. “She knows my kids’ names. She’s been to my house,” Turcotte said, and the state senator is “very much aware” of her advocacy on behalf of Armenian refugees, including her 2012 memoir, Nowhere: A Story of Exile, which was originally written in her early teens, in Russian.
Turcotte said she approached Duson a few years ago about efforts to require genocide education in Maine schools. A bill to include genocide education, Holocaust studies and African American studies in Maine public school curricula was subsequently passed, but Duson “had no interest” in it, Turcotte said. “It actually kind of stunned me. … It’s a little strange — she didn’t even want to discuss it. Then I kind of started piecing it together after this trip [to Azerbaijan] that she knew Tarlan, and he’s very much an Armenian Genocide–denier.”
Dhalac and Duson both blocked Turcotte on Facebook after she challenged them about their trip last year. Appeals to Maine Democratic Party leadership went unanswered and unacknowledged. “It feels to me and to many people that they’re more concerned [with] circling the wagons and protecting their candidates,” Turcotte said, noting that this was during the run-up to last year’s state legislative elections.
But even once safely in office, Maine Democrats won’t acknowledge genocide, as evidenced by the silence surrounding the circumstances of Ahmadov’s sudden “resignation” from the ONA.
“The final step of genocide is denial,” said Turcotte. “So in many ways, Governor Mills is denying that these [anti-Armenian] comments happened and that the ethnic cleansing of Armenians of Nagorno-Karabakh happened in September of 2023, before this trip. So you are denying it. You’re contributing to this genocide of my people.
“And how can you create an Office of New Americans,” she added, “when new Americans that have been coming here for generations [who] are Armenian, because of this same hatred, are not supported by your initiatives, because you don’t speak for us, you don’t stand up for us.”
Ahmadov’s personal, professional and political network in Maine is extensive. When he was hired to lead the ONA last December, a long list of business leaders and nonprofit directors wrote blurbs praising and congratulating him for the official press release. A typical example: “I am thrilled that Governor Mills has appointed Tarlan Ahmadov to lead the Office of New Americans,” wrote Marpheen Chann, executive director of Khmer Maine, which serves Cambodians exiled by atrocities. “Tarlan is collaborative by nature and understands the hard work needed to build community buy-in and consensus.”
Ahmadov sits on the advisory board of the Foundation for Portland Public Schools, a nonprofit that raises private funds for public school initiatives. He’s also on the board of trustees of Maine Public, the state’s public broadcasting network. In addition to leading the local Azerbaijan Society of Maine, he’s treasurer of the national Alliance of Azerbaijani American Organizations, and is said to have been given an award by the Azerbaijani government for his work in the U.S. He lives in a beautiful house with a three-car garage on a private road in West Falmouth. On a recent visit, one end of his arcing driveway was blocked with two orange cones, for no obvious reason.
One detail in Ahmadov’s official Department of Labor bio raised red flags when Armenians saw it: his past operation of “a consulting business to the Consulate of Azerbaijan in Tehran, Iran.”
“The Azeri-Iranian relationship is very fraught, it’s very tense,” Proudian observed. “No Armenians are reading that and saying, ‘This guy was making menus for the ambassador.’”
Indeed, Ahmadov, identified as an “Azerbaijani activist” by media outlet AzNewsTV, is quoted in an undated report (likely from late 2022 or early ’23) strongly condemning the government in Tehran. “In the occupied territories of Azerbaijan” — by which he means Karabakh — “Iran played a significant role in supporting Armenia. Everything that they did was against Azerbaijan.” He calls the planned opening of an Armenian museum in Iran “to preserve Armenian history in the Tabriz region” a “provocation” and part of “the falsification of the history of Azerbaijani settlement in the region.”
This view accords with longstanding Azeri efforts to erase Armenian history inside Azerbaijan’s borders by, in part, claiming a different ethnic group lived in those mountains before modern times — in contradiction to mountains of evidence by non-Azeri researchers. “When Tarlan defends and promotes the government of Azerbaijan,” said Proudian, “he’s promoting an actively racist and genocidal government that as a matter of policy has no place for Armenians.”
On the Cambridge student podcast this year, Ghazaryan, the European law professor, said Azerbaijan tries to deflect international charges of ethnic cleansing by claiming Armenians are welcome to return to Karabakh. She called that claim “absolutely ridiculous, given the fact that Azerbaijan is an authoritarian country.
“Even ethnic Azeris don’t have any rights there, unless you are the friend or family member of President Aliyev,” Ghazaryan said. “And there is intrenched Armenophobia. Children are taught from kindergarten to hate Armenians. It’s genuinely unimaginable for any Armenian to feel safe being under Azeri authority, particularly when you deny the very existence of this group.”
In her letter to Mills this February protesting Ahmadov’s ONA directorship, Turcotte recalled the late summer day in 2023 when she and her family got the Tarlan zoom and boom. She was with her kids and her father, who was then in the last stages of cancer, picking berries at Libby & Son, in Limerick.
“I saw Mr. Ahmadov staring at us,” she recalled, and tried to avoid him by leading her family higher up a hill. “I thought that, surely, in public, with a crowd, Mr. Ahmadov would not upset my obviously-ill father.
“I was wrong,” Turcotte told Mills. “As soon as we rounded the corner of the blueberry rows, Mr. Ahmadov accosted my father and lied to him, telling him that he and I were friends. He then began to taunt him for being Armenian and asking him why he hadn’t returned to Azerbaijan — knowing full well that under the threat of imminent death we had literally left everything behind…” This was “shocking and upsetting to my father … [who] passed away just after Christmas 2023, four months after that interaction.”
“‘Despicable’ is not a strong enough word,” Turcotte concluded. Ahmadov “is an online troll, spewing hate and bigotry, specifically targeting an immigrant (and refugee) community. … Put most simply: he is full of hate and cannot serve in this capacity.”
She received no reply.
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