• Olympique de Marseille is playing its qualification for the round of 16 of the Europa League Conference in Baku, Azerbaijan, after winning 3 goals to 1 in the first leg.

  • The FK Qarabag club, founded in 1951, hails from Agdam, a city which it had to leave in 1993 to join the capital of Azerbaijan, Baku.

  • A move forced by the conflict between Armenia and Azerbaijan for control of the Nagorno-Karabakh region.

90th minute of the match between Olympique de Marseille and FK Qarabag, Nikola Dabanovic, the referee of the match, is about to blow the final whistle as Dimitri Payet has just scored his team's 3rd goal.

The moment chosen by several spectators located in the Ganay stand of the Vélodrome stadium to unfurl the flags of Armenia, as well as a banner "Qarabag is Armenia".

Enough to make UEFA react in the quarter turn, with the opening of disciplinary proceedings against Olympique de Marseille.

The organizing body of European football competitions prohibits any political position in its stadiums and sanctions "provocative messages which are of a political, ideological, religious or insulting nature".

Club from a disputed area

Because FK Qarabag is more than a football club.

It is also a geopolitical issue for Azerbaijan.

“The FK Qarabag club comes from Agdam, a city located in the Nagorno-Karabakh region.

It has been a disputed area between Armenia and Azerbaijan since the beginning of the 20th century, when Stalin's USSR made the borders as it saw fit.

By making this region an Azeri zone, while it concentrates a strong Armenian population.

And this conflict was never resolved during the collapse of the USSR, ”explains Kevin Veyssiere, creator of the media FC Geopolitics, who is interested in geopolitics through sport.

It was in 1993, in the midst of a war between Armenia and Azerbaijan for control of Nagorno-Karabakh, that the club was forced to move to Baku, the Azerbaijani capital, when Agdam came under Armenian control.

“Since then, FK Qarabag has acquired a political aim through the image of real Azeris forced into exile.

For people less familiar with the conflict, Qarabag is seen as an Azeri club.

The region is therefore connected to this country, there is an issue of sovereignty behind all that, ”continues the founder of FC Geopolitic.

For several years, Azerbaijan has been promoting diplomacy through sport through the organization of major events such as the Formula 1 Grand Prix in Baku, the Europa League final in 2019, (for which the Arsenal player, and Armenian, Henrikh Mkhitaryan, had refused to play for security reasons).

And FK Qarabag is an integral part of it, as Azerbaijani sports journalist Elmir Aliyev pointed out to AFP: “FK Qarabag is the most popular club in the country, even more than the national team.

Many in Azerbaijan support the club because of its international victories, but also because of its name”.

Painful memories for the Armenians of Marseille

A name that makes Pascal Chamassian jump, former president of the Coordinating Council of Armenian Organizations of France (CCAF) Marseille-Provence.

“It is a great moment of pain which brings us back to the will of the Turks and their Azeri brothers to exterminate the Armenians.

The name " Nagorno Karabakh " is inherited from the Turkish language.

The Armenian name of this region is Artsakh, the use of the old Azeri name is an issue of influence,” he says.

This match between OM and Qarabag brings back bad memories for him, as well as for the 80,000 inhabitants of Marseille of Armenian origin.

“There is inevitably a strong resonance in Marseille, which became the capital of the Armenians of Europe after the genocide of 1915”, recalls Pascal Chamassian.

All the more so with the resurgence of the conflict in 2020. head of the club's communications has been banned for life by UEFA from all football-related activity].

UEFA has again shown its limits.

While the flags deployed at the Vélodrome were a strong mark to affirm that Marseille is a land dear to Armenians.

It was a message probably relating to the Turkish-Azerbaijani aggression of a year and a half ago, it was a fairly peaceful form of response, ”he believes.

A peaceful mark, but resentments remain stubborn, enough to wish for nothing more than a qualification for OM against Qarabag, Thursday evening in Baku: “I can't imagine anything else.

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  • Azerbaijan

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  • Europa League Conference

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