Azerbaijan - Current

The flag of Azerbaijan (Azerbaijani: Azərbaycan bayrağı). It consists of three equal horizontal bands coloured blue, red, and green, with a white crescent and an eight-pointed star (Rub El Hizb) centred in the red band. The eight points of the star stand for the branches of the Turkic people. The blue band is the colour of the Turks. The green is for Islam and red is for progress and Europeanisation. The official colours and size were adopted on 5th February 1991 based on a flag originally used between 1918 and 1920. The flag is used on land as the civil, state and war flag, and at sea as the civil, state and naval ensign and naval jack. The specific shades of the national flag were laid out in a 2004 law as the following: Blue - Pantone 313 C, CMYK (%) C 100 - M 10 - Y 0 - K 5 , Red - Pantone 185 C, CMYK (%) C 0 - M 90 - Y 100 - K 0, Green - Pantone 3405 C, CMYK (%) C 100 - M 0 - Y 90 - K 5. The flag has the ratio of 1:2

The meaning of the colours of the flag was defined by the nationalist leader Ali Bey Hussein Zade as follows. Blue represents the need of Turkization. Green represents the need of Islamization. Red represents the need of modernization and progress, following the European example.

The eight-pointed star is said to stand for the eight Turkic peoples of the world, classified as Azeris (aka Azerbaidjanis), Ottomans (aka Anatolians or Turkish "proper"), Jagatais (aka Chagatai or Turkmens), Tatars, Kipchaks (aka Kazakhs and Kirghiz), Seljuks (aka Salchuq, Azeris living in Iran)and Turkomans (aka Turkmenians). This only amounts to seven and this clustering and classification are traditional (the eight-pointed star was on the Azeri flag already in 1918 and probably was created much earlier) and doesn't follow any modern linguistical or anthropological classification of the Turkic peoples.