The anti-Azerbaijani sentiment or Azerbaijanophobia has been mainly rooted in several countries, most notably in Armenia and Iran, where anti-Azerbaijani sentiment has sometimes led to violence racial incidents.

According to a 2012 opinion poll, 63% of Armenians perceive Azerbaijan as "the biggest enemy of Armenia" while 94% of Azerbaijanis consider Armenia to be "the biggest enemy of Azerbaijan."^[1] The root of the hostility against Azerbaijanis traced from the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict.

In the early 20th century the Transcaucasian Armenians began to equate the Azerbaijani people with the perpetrators of anti-Armenian policies such as the Armenian Genocide in the Ottoman Empire.^[2]

Soon afterward a wave of anti-Azerbaijani massacres in both Azerbaijan and Armenia started in 1918 and continued until 1920. First, in March 1918, a massacre of the Azerbaijanis in Baku took place. An estimate of 3,000 to 10,000 Azerbaijanis were killed by nationalist Dashnak Armenians, orchestrated by the Bolshevist Stepan Shahumyan. The massacre was later called the March Days.^{[citation needed]}

After the Nagorno-Karabakh War anti-Azerbaijani sentiment grew in Armenia, leading to harassment of Azerbaijanis there.^[3] In the beginning of 1988 the first refugee waves from Armenia reached Baku. In 1988, Azerbaijanis and Kurds (around 167,000 people) were expelled from the Armenian SSR.^[4] Following the Karabakh movement, initial violence erupted in the form of the murder of both Armenians and Azerbaijanis and border skirmishes.^[5] As a result of these pogroms, Armenians have killed 214 Azerbaijanis and ethnically cleansed Azerbaijanis from all territory of Armenia between 1987 and 1990.^[6]

On June 7, 1988 Azerbaijanis were evicted from the town of Masis near the Armenian–Turkish border, and on June 20 five Azerbaijani villages were cleansed in the Ararat Province.^[7] Henrik Pogosian was ultimately forced to retire, blamed for letting nationalism develop freely.^[7] Although purges of the Armenian and Azerbaijani party structures were made against those who had fanned or not sought to prevent ethnic strife, as a whole, the measures taken are believed to be meager.^[7]

The year 1993 was marked by the highest wave of the Azerbaijani internally displaced persons, when the Karabakh Armenian forces occupied territories beyond the Nagorno-Karabakh borders.^[8] The Karabakhi Armenians ultimately succeeded in removing Azerbaijanis from Nagorno-Karabakh.

On January 16, 2003 Robert Kocharian said that Azerbaijanis and Armenians were "ethnically incompatible"^[9] and it was impossible for the Armenian population of Karabakh to live within an Azerbaijani state.^[10] Speaking on 30 January in Strasbourg, Council of Europe Secretary-General Walter Schwimmer said Kocharian's comment was tantamount to warmongering. Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe President Peter Schieder said he hopes Kocharian's remark was incorrectly translated, adding that "since its creation, the Council of Europe has never heard the phrase "ethnic incompatibility".^[10]

In 2010 an initiative to hold a festival of Azerbaijani films in Yerevan was blocked due to popular opposition. Similarly, in 2012 a festival of Azerbaijani short films, organized by the Armenia-based Caucasus Center for Peace-Making Initiatives and supported by the U.S. and British embassies, which was scheduled to open on April 12, was canceled in Gyumri after protesters blocked the festival venue.^[11][12]

On September 2, 2015, the Minister of Justice Arpine Hovhannisyan on her personal Facebook page shared an article link featuring her interview with the Armenian news website Tert.am where she condemned the sentencing of an Azerbaijani journalist and called the human rights situation in Azerbaijan "appalling". Subsequently, the minister came under criticism for liking a racist comment on the aforementioned Facebook post by Hovhannes Galajyan, editor-in-chief of local Armenian newspaper Iravunk; On the post, Galajyan had commented in Armenian: “What human rights when even purely biologically a Turk cannot be considered a human".[1]

In 1990 a mosque in Yerevan was pulled down with a bulldozer.^[13][14] The Blue Mosque is the only one that remains in present-day Yerevan.

In the opinion of Thomas de Waal, the destruction of a mosque in Armenia was facilitated by a linguistic sleight of hand, as the name “Azeri” or “Azerbaijani” was not in common usage before the twentieth century, and these people were referred to as “Tartars”, “Turks” or simply “Muslims”. Azerbaijanis are being written out of the history of Armenia, and Armenians refer to Muslim monuments as "Persian", even though the worshippers in a mosque built in 1760 would have been Turkic-speaking Shiite subjects of Safavid dynasty, i.e. the ancestors of Azerbaijanis.^[15]

Anti-Azerbaijani sentiment is rooted in the hostility in 1990s, during which Iran was blamed by Azerbaijan for supporting Armenia in the Nagorno-Karabakh War despite Iranian government claimed it helped Azerbaijan.^[16][17] Therefore, a sense of hostility against Azerbaijan developed in Iran as a result and it ironically boosted alliance between Iran and Armenia.

In 2006, a cartoon controversy with regard to Azerbaijani people had led to unrest as the Azerbaijanis have been compared to cockroaches by the Persian-speaking majority population.^[18][19] During 2012, fans of Tractor Sazi, an Azerbaijani-dominated football club, chanted anti-Iranian rhetorics voicing against oppression on Azerbaijanis by the Iranian government and negligence on ethnic Azerbaijanis after the East Azerbaijan earthquakes; the Iranian police force responded violently and arrested dozens.^[20] Azerbaijani activists have also faced increasing harassments by the Iranian government for its effort to protect the Azerbaijani minority in Iran.^[21]

In 2020, during the 2020 Nagorno-Karabakh War, anti-Armenian protest broke out in Azerbaijani-dominated provinces where Azerbaijanis demanded closure of border between Iran and Armenia and accused Iranian government of tacit support for Armenia; the Iranian police responded by beating and arresting Azerbaijani protesters.^[22][23][24]

During Georgia's movement toward independence from the Soviet Union, the Azeri population expressed fear for its fate in independent Georgia. In the late 1980s, most ethnic Azeris occupying local government positions in the Azeri-populated areas were removed from their positions.^[25] In 1989, there were changes in the ethnic composition of the local authorities and the resettlement of thousands of eco-migrants who had suffered from landslides in the mountainous region of Svaneti. The local Azeri population, accepting of the migrants at first, demanded only to resolve the problem of Azeri representation on the municipal level. The demands were ignored; later the eco-migrants, culturally different from the local population and facing social hardships, were accused of attacks and robbery against the Azeris,^[26] which in turn led to demonstrations, ethnic clashes between Svans and Azeris, demands for an Azeri autonomy in Borchali and for the expulsion of Svan immigrants from Kvemo-Kartli.^[27][28] The antagonism reached its peak during the presidency of Zviad Gamsakhurdia (1991–1992), when hundreds of Azeri families were forcibly evicted from their homes in Dmanisi and Bolnisi by nationalist paramilitaries and fled to Azerbaijan. Thousands of Azeris emigrated in fear of nationalist policies.^[28] In his speech in Kvareli, Gamsakhurdia accused the Azeri population of Kakheti of "holding up their heads and measuring swords with Kakheti".<ref name="mark">(in Russian) Sergey Markedonov

• Anti-Turkism
• List of massacres of Azerbaijanis
• Anti-Armenian sentiment in Azerbaijan

• Armenian-Azeri Mutual Perceptions Project

Template:Anti-cultural sentiment

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