Armenia, Azerbaijan and the Garlicky Taste of Enmity

Armenians are constantly on the ball for possible attacks from implacable foe Azerbaijan, but who would have expected an enemy infiltration so unspeakably vile in nature? Garlic, grown on Azerbaijan’s hostile soil, apparently has found a way to penetrate the two countries' sealed border, and then had the effrontery to appear on vegetable stands in the Armenian capital, Yerevan.  

Respected historian Samvel Karapetian was grocery shopping in a Yerevan supermarket, Hayastan, when he chanced upon packets of the bulbous, pungent emissaries from Azerbaijan, the very country that fought a long and bloody war with Armenia over the breakaway Nagorno-Karabakh region. Since the 1988-1994 war, anything Azerbaijani has been mostly seen in Armenia as unspeakably heinous, and vice versa.

A concerned citizen, Karapetian sounded the alarm, and reporters hurried to the scene. “Garlic of the company based on [President Heydar] Aliyev Street in Baku is gleefully sold in… an Armenian supermarket,” the puzzled historian said.

In the supermarket, reporters found a confused shop assistant and manager, who pled not guilty. “I am beginning to think that somebody wants to frame me,” the director of the Hayastan Supermarket told Emedia.am news service.

The director said he cannot trace every food product all the way to its source, unless it is a sausage. He claimed that the garlic penetration must have been an unfortunate mistake, but local journalists are not buying this.  Apparently, some fear that the garlic could be an early sign of more deadly forms of
warfare. Investigators have already whisked off the offending bulbs, but did they act in time before unsuspecting citizens added the Azerbaijani garlic  to dolma or khorovatz sauce? Wrote one publication ominously: “Today it’s garlic, tomorrow it will be something else.”