Oil Cash and Kim Kardashian Take Armenia-Azerbaijan Conflict Online
- Armenian, Azerbaijani advocates fight to sway public opinion
- Toxic campaigns make compromise in the conflict difficult
As fighting rages between Azerbaijan and Armenia, an intense propaganda war is also being waged for the moral high ground, boosted by Azerbaijani oil revenues, new media and Armenia’s large and vocal diaspora.
Within hours of hostilities reigniting around the Armenian-occupied enclave of Nagorno-Karabakh, the two sides’ efforts to recruit governments and public opinion went into overdrive -- including from Hollywood’s reality TV star Kim Kardashian West, who is of Armenian extraction.
“Please share the news,” Kardashian wrote in a series of tweets to her 67 million followers on Sept. 27, the day fighting broke out. “Armenians in #Artsakh have been attacked,” she said, using the Armenian name for Nagorno-Karabakh, and including links to a petition for Congress to “Sanction Azerbaijani War Crimes.”
Azerbaijan’s border guard service deployed onto the social media battlefield the same day, posting a slick video of a heavy metal band in military uniforms singing a patriotic anthem, “Ates” or “Fire,” against a backdrop of tanks, jets, rocket launchers and “Apocalypse Now”-style helicopter attacks.