The Dallas Morning News: "Azerbaijanis pick up lessons to take home"

The small group of Azerbaijanis, mostly Muslims, clustered around the director of the Dallas Holocaust Museum. They peppered him with details about a massacre they said was committed in their country in 1992 by Armenians.

Wednesday's confluence of culture, faith and historical grief was part of a tour organized by the U.S. Agency for International Development. The Community Connections program brings groups from the former Soviet Union to the United States.

This group, 11 men and women from the Louisiana-sized nation of Azerbaijan, was in the middle of a three-week visit to Dallas and Fort Worth.

They asked museum director Elliott Dlin how they could better educate their people about their own history. He tapped on a button he wore that bore the photo of a child killed by the Nazis.

The button was part of the Every Child Has a Name program, which connects modern-day schoolchildren with photos and names of young Holocaust victims, he said. They could try a similar program, he said.

"This is a simple thing to do, with one school or one instructor, that gets them involved with personalizing the history. And it does not require a big budget or a museum," he said.

But their government is reluctant to publicize negative events in Azerbaijani history, they told him sadly, as he continued the tour.

This group is in the U.S. to learn how nonprofit groups operate. Azerbaijan has been independent for 15 years – the anniversary was Wednesday – so private aid agencies and foundations are just getting started.

Azerbaijan has about 8 million citizens. Most are Shiite Muslims, but the country has longstanding populations of Christians and Jews who survived the Nazis and the long anti-religion crackdown under the Soviets.

Members of the tour included three imams, a couple of journalists, a teacher and a college professor. Several made a point of talking about the diversity and lack of religious discrimination in their young nation.

A 2005 State Department report said that Azerbaijan grants considerable freedom to government-approved faiths but that evangelical groups, including Baptists and Jehovah's Witnesses, have not been welcomed.

Mr. Dlin worked his way through the exhibits at the museum, suggesting the lesson his visitors should take with them: "How people ought not to behave toward each other."

"The question we ask in this museum is this: What are people in another 60 years going to ask about us?" he said, reeling off a list of horrors in Cambodia, East Timor, Rwanda and Darfur. He included the Armenian attack on Azerbaijanis in the disputed territory of Nagorno Karabakh.

"What's our responsibility?" he asked.

Speaking through interpreters, the visitors asked about the details of the Nazi atrocity: Why did they kill Christians of Jewish ancestry? Because the Nazis considered Judaism to be an inherited characteristic, Mr. Dlin said.

Is there a lesson in the Holocaust that offers any hope for peace in the Middle East, one man asked?

Unfortunately some leaders on both sides have taken the wrong message from the Holocaust, Mr. Dlin said. "The wrong lesson is that 'I need to be so strong and powerful that this can never happen to me,' " he said.

Shunasi Mammadyarov, a theologian at an Azerbaijani mosque, interrupted to tell a story of his visit 25 years ago to a synagogue. He noticed artwork on one wall depicting an angel bringing a ram to substitute for the sacrifice of Isaac by Abraham.

Muslims have a similar story, but it involves Abraham's other son, Ishmael, he said. "But I don't think it makes any difference whether Allah stopped the killing of Isaac or Ishmael. God didn't want anyone to be killed."

The visit to the Holocaust museum was one stop on an ambitious tour that started last Thursday and ends Nov. 2.

In between, the group is scheduled to learn about interfaith cooperation at Thanks-Giving Square, separation of faith and government at Southern Methodist University, religious education at the Islamic school Brighter Horizons, private aid to the poor at Central Dallas Ministries, and organizing aid programs at the United Way of Metropolitan Dallas. These are among dozens of private and governmental agencies they'll visit.

Everywhere they go, they'll listen. But they'll also talk about their homeland, a place they know most Americans know next to nothing about, said Solmaz Mehdiyeva, a journalist and teacher.

"We didn't just come here to learn," she said. "We came here to express our experience."

/The Dallas Morning News/