This is the call of those forced into exile.
This is the call of women, LGBTQ+ people, and all feminized bodies whom the Azerbaijani regime seeks to erase, control, and exploit.
This is the call of workers whose sweat fuels an empire built on plunder.
This is the call of the imprisoned, the disappeared, the silenced.
This is the call of the dead, of those murdered by the state, by its police, its prisons, its military, its patriarchs.
This is the call of the living—those who refuse to kneel.
Azerbaijan is a machine of extraction. It extracts oil from the earth, war from its people, and obedience from its women. It extracts labor, bodies, voices, and dissent, feeding it all into the flames of its imperial ambitions. It demands blood to lubricate its gears. It demands silence so that its victory can be absolute. It demands that we believe there is no alternative, that power is eternal, that its rule is natural and inevitable.
But the truth is written in the margins of its victories, in the spaces it tries to erase. The truth is written in the bodies of women forced to birth its wars, in the hands of workers whose stolen wages build its towers, in the voices of those it imprisons, in the earth, its waters and soils destroyed for profit. The truth is that its power is built on fragile ground. That its legitimacy - a lie, its survival - temporary.
Azerbaijan is not unique. Its regime is a symptom of a global disease: the metastasis of capitalism into fascism. Across the world, borders harden. Militaries expand. Dictatorships consolidate power while so-called "democracies" mask their violence under bureaucracy; all while funding, legitimizing, and safeguarding those very dictatorships when it serves their interests. The far-right rises, feeding on the exhaustion of the poor, the despair of the dispossessed, the failures of the so-called "left." Everywhere, women are forced back into submission, their labor stolen to reproduce a system that devours them. Everywhere, queerness is criminalized, workers are terrorized, war is normalized.
The murderous logic of the alleged dividing line in our lives between "the personal" and "the public" is precisely what states continue: namely the dividing line between internal and external affairs. While a femicide takes place, when our reproductive work is made invisible, it is dismissed as a personal problem, a family problem. Just like with the women in prison. They are not an issue in external affairs because that would be an internal problem of aliyev's dictatorship. While Western governments shook hands with our local oppressors pretending to champion human rights in a supposedly morally superior instance, but in fact buying our oil, funding our military, arming our police, we were dispossessed. Their murderous democracy is a mask for empire. Their war-promoting peace is built on our graves.
Azerbaijan is a model of capitalist authoritarianism. Its regime has perfected the art of using war to cement power, using nationalism to mask theft, using oil to buy silence. It is a parasite that feeds on the bodies of women, on the sweat of workers, on the tongues of those who dare to speak.
To be a woman in Azerbaijan today is to live under the double weight of capitalist exploitation and patriarchal violence. The state does not only extract our labor, but also it extracts our very existence. It demands that we serve, that we reproduce, that we remain silent. It demands our bodies as vessels for its soldiers, our hands as laborers for its oligarchs, our voices as echoes of its lies. If we refuse, we are punished. We are beaten. We are murdered. Those who escape are forced into exile, carrying their rage across borders.
To be queer in Azerbaijan is to be told you do not exist. The state does not even grant us the dignity of criminalization—it erases us entirely. We are ghosts in our own land, living in fear of families who have been turned into enforcers of state ideology, in fear of police who hunt us like prey, in fear of a society that has been taught to see our deaths as righteous.
And yet, we exist.
We refuse disappearance.
We refuse silence.
We refuse to be the soil from which the state grows its empire.
Azerbaijan is a country of exiles. Not only those of us who have been forced to leave, but those trapped within borders they cannot escape. The political prisoners, the activists, the dissidents, the feminists, the workers. Those who whisper their defiance in the shadows, those who resist in ways too small to be seen, those who are waiting for the fire to spread. Even behind bars, they resist.
The women journalists of Azerbaijan, imprisoned for daring to speak, do not fall silent. They smuggle out words like contraband, turning prison walls into battlefields. They write manifestos in the margins of legal documents, carve truth into the cement of their cells. They pass notes between bars, whisper defiance through prison grates, refuse the humiliation of forced confessions. The state locks them away, thinking that steel and stone can contain them—but their words escape, their courage spreads, their resistance infects the air. Even in captivity, they remain free. Even in darkness, they remain the light.
This system is not broken. It is functioning exactly as intended. It is built on war, on the backs of the poor, on the unpaid labor of women, on the stolen wages of workers, on the silence of the oppressed. It is upheld by an international order that profits from our suffering, by Western governments that shake hands with our murderers while preaching democracy, by global capital that funds our repression.
We reject their definitions of victory and defeat. If their "success" means the domination of the strong over the weak, the triumph of war over peace, the supremacy of capital over life—then we reject success. We choose rebellion. If to "win" means to submit, to accept, to forget—then let us be losers forever.
But we will not be losers in the way they want. We will be losers like the barricades of Paris in 1871, like the revolutionaries of Kronstadt, like the Spanish anarchists who fought against Franco, like the Kurdish women resisting colonial fascism. We will be the fire that refuses to be extinguished.
They call us traitors, but we are betraying nothing but their order.
They call us criminals, but we reject their laws, written by blood.
They call us failures, but we are the beginning of something they cannot imagine.
We do not ask for freedom.
We do not beg for rights.
We do not seek recognition.
We take what is ours.
We reclaim what was stolen.
We will build new worlds from the ashes of the old.
We call on every woman, every queer person, every worker, every exiled dissident to rise. To resist not just in words, but in action. To refuse to comply, to disrupt, to sabotage, to fight. To build networks of resistance across borders, to shatter the illusions that keep us chained.
As long as etatist exterminations are legal, resistance is our duty! As long as etatist extermination strategies and policies are legal, our resistance is survival-urgent. As long as our spaces, our bodies are taken away, deformed, stolen from us, then resistance is quite a obligation!
Resistance is not just a word—it, it is an act. Sabotage their economy. Cripple their surveillance. Refuse their control. Every disrupted pipeline, every hacked government system, every collective act of defiance is a step toward our freedom. Our determination, autonomy, and resistance know no borders!
We resist everywhere: in every land, in the mountains, in the heart of cities, in villages, inside prisons, on the streets, at sea, at borders, in refugee camps, at universities, in factories, in workplaces, in schools, at home and within our bodies poisoned by the system!
We know that our self-organisation and our self-defence are our strength, resulting from the necessity of living in these miserable conditions, in the fight against patriarchy, militarism, fascism, racist white supremacy and state-organised and backed up capitalism.
Resistance is the only way to end this cruelty! In the spirit of internationalist solidarity and comradeship, our resistance will break down these oppressive systems, which are border-enforced by the military, gendered in hierarchy, and divided by class.
Resistance is not a choice, but a way of life! It is an unbreakable force that drives us in our fight for justice and freedom. Even in the darkest of times, the flame of resistance can never be extinguished!
The more we are oppressed, the bigger and more steadfast we become. Even when they steal our hope, we take it back in the fire of our rage!
Remember, this world is not eternal. Power is not permanent. The fears and dangers they impose on us are real, but not invincible. The walls of every empire will crack. The lies of every dictator will be exposed. The more we move, the more we realize how thick the chains of oppression are. The chains they place on us will shatter.
Remember, they want us to drown in despair. They want us to feel small. But we dance. We love. We sing songs of rebellion. We dream beyond their walls. We orginize. Our joy is our defiance. Our love is our revolution. We fight, it means we are living. Together, we can challenge the oppressive system that seeks to silence us with its guns, prisons, and monopoly on the use of force. We will build from the ashes of the ruins they have caused. The power is in our hands; in the hands of the people.
Remember, if we, the 99%, refuse, the system stands paralyzed!
And remember, there will be no liberation granted from above. There will be no liberation through NGOs funded by our oppressors. No savior will come. No government will deliver us. No Western think-tank will save us. They will repackage our suffering, turn it into a policy paper, call it progress and make their career out of it. But we know: real freedom is seized, not granted.
March 8th is not a symbolic day, it is our declaration of fight in the knowledge that our hands can not only create their wealth, but also fight for a new world!
We will free ourselves, or we will not be free at all.
This is our vow, this March 8 and every day after:
We don't and will not comply.
We don't and will not forgive.
We do and will fight back in rage!
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