By ANDRÉ CROUS
Prague Post
Widespread clampdown on human rights activists and a Twitter rant by president of country currently presiding over the Council of Europe
Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev has had a lot on his mind in recent days, and he has made a point of letting the world know what he is thinking. On Aug. 7, a skirmish broke out between Azerbaijani and Armenian soldiers in the Nagorno-Karabkh region, an internationally unrecognized breakaway republic inside Azerbaijan, where the atmosphere has been tense since a ceasefire ended the Nagorno-Karabakh War in 1994.
President Aliyev’s response was immediate, and it was frantic. He fired off a tweet on his official English-language Twitter account, stating that “[a]s a result of attacks launched by Armenian occupying forces, our army suffered losses. Several servicemen have become martyrs.” Within the next few hours, this initial message was followed by no fewer than 55 separate tweets before concluding with a call for the territory of Nagorno-Karabakh to return to Azerbaijan: “We will restore all of the occupied and destroyed cities. We will return to this land, we live and will live with this idea.”
The deep-seated distrust between Azerbaijan and Armenia (the former does not issue a visa to foreigners if a visa to the latter appears in the passport, and vice versa; likewise, there are no diplomatic relations between the two countries) was also made clear in some of the messages, as President Aliyev labeled Armenia “the aggressor state” and said, “The Azerbaijani state will never tolerate a second Armenian state on its territory.”
Nagorno-Karabakh, whose population comprises Armenians almost exclusively, declared independence from Azerbaijan in 1992, escalating a long-simmering conflict that had started in 1988 and sparking a war that would last until 1994 and lead to deaths in the order of 30,000 people, with between two and three times as many people wounded in the fighting. A ceasefire agreement has been in force since 1994, but although the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe Minsk Group has been tasked with finding a resolution to the conflict for 20 years, the scuffle two weeks ago reminds the world how little progress has been made.
Armenian President Serge Sargsyan, first elected to office in 2008 and re-elected in 2013, has a personal stake in maintaining the status quo, namely that Nagorno-Karabakh not be returned to Azerbaijan, as he was born in the capital, Stepanakert. The same was true of his predecessor.
After the verbal offensive mounted by Aliyev, he and Sargsyan met with Russian President Vladimir Putin, for whom peace in the region is of particular importance while the situation on the border with Ukraine remains tense. On Saturday, Aug. 9, Putin met with each of the two presidents separately and then mediated talks between them the next day in Sochi. According to a truncated transcript of the discussions, provided by the Kremlin’s Presidential Press Service, the talks were cordial and focused on resolving the longstanding conflict without further bloodshed.
The tone of this meeting stood in stark contrast to Aliyev’s Twitter rant earlier in the week and to the tenor of their previous meeting, at the Eastern Partnership summit held in April in Prague. At that event, Sargsyan’s reference to Turkey’s genocide of the Armenian people 100 years ago drew condemnation from Aliyev. Azerbaijan is a longtime ally of Turkey, and Aliyev took Sargsyan to task for criticizing a country that is in no position to defend itself as Turkey didn’t have any representatives at the meeting. Aliyev ended his speech with a suggestion that the European community impose sanctions on Armenia for its occupation of Azerbaijani territory, meaning the Nagorno-Karabakh region.
Aliyev has been president since 2003, having followed up the only other post-Soviet president of an independent Azerbaijan: his father, Heydar Aliyev. A referendum in 2009 ended the restriction on presidential term limits, meaning Aliyev can continue to run for re-election indefinitely. According to official results, he was elected by 85 percent of the electorate in the most recent election at the end of 2013.
Besides the volatility of the events in Nagorno-Karabakh, there has been evidence of an even more disturbing trend in Azerbaijan. Noted human rights activist Leyla Yunus, director of the Institute for Peace and Democracy, was detained Jul. 31 on charges of treason and tax evasion, among others, according to Human Rights Watch. Less than a week later, on his way to deliver a food parcel to her in her prison cell, Yunus’ husband, Arif, was also arrested and charged with treason and fraud.
The very same day, July 31, Rasul Jafarov, another prominent human rights activist, was arrested when he tried to cross the border to Georgia, and he was subsequently charged with tax evasion, illegal entrepreneurship and abuse of office, according to The Guardian.
Shortly after Arif Yunus’ arrest, a prominent human rights lawyer named Intigam Aliyev was arrested and charged with treason for allegedly working with pro-Armenian NGOs. On Aug. 8, a travel ban was imposed on Emin Huseynov, founder of the Institute for Reporters’ Freedom and Safety (IRFS), and the offices of the IRFS ransacked, and the BBC is reporting that Huseynov’s whereabouts are currently unknown, with initial reports that he had taken refuge in the U.S. Embassy denied by the staff at the diplomatic mission.
What is peculiar about the current crackdown on dissent is that it is taking place in the middle of Azerbaijan’s rotating presidency of the Council of Europe, which it holds until November. A condition to membership of the 48-member organization is that the country signs the European Convention of Human Rights.
“The situation of human rights in Azerbaijan, a member country of the Council of Europe, is indeed a source of deep concern for our organization,” Can Fişek, media officer at the Council of Europe, told The Prague Post via e-mail. “We continue to follow developments in Azerbaijan closely. In this respect, reconvening a meeting of the joint committee bringing together the presidential administration and representatives of civil society, in the presence of a Council of Europe representative, is a specific objective. In his phone conversation with [Council of Europe] Secretary General [Thorbjørn] Jagland, President Aliyev agreed to re-convene this committee.”
The Council of Europe’s commissioner for human rights, Nils Muižnieks, released a statement earlier this month emphasizing his concern about the crackdown in Azerbaijan. Referencing the human rights advocates above, he noted with regret that they “followed a long list of arrests of activists [in the country] who are now muzzled behind bars.”
With a recent editorial in The Washington Post also lamenting the state of affairs for human rights activists in Azerbaijan, and the country seemingly quashing dissent wherever possible, it would appear this Central Asian nation has a way to go to live up to the words of the convention it signed, which reaffirm a “profound belief in those fundamental freedoms which are the foundation of justice and peace in the world and are best maintained on the one hand by an effective political democracy and on the other by a common understanding and observance of the human rights upon which they depend.”