Azerbaijan's Poor Image Armenia's Fault

Politicians in Baku have accused the United States-based watchdog group Freedom House of serving Armenian interests after it labelled Azerbaijan as “not free”.

In its latest Freedom in the World report covering 2010, Freedom House said the US and other governments put their own strategic interests first in dealing with certain countries and ignored “patently fraudulent elections” in Azerbaijan because of its oil wealth.

Another US-based group, Human Rights Watch, has also criticised Azerbaijan’s record on political and civil reports in its latest World Report.

“The parliamentary elections of November 7 failed to meet international standards. Other serious problems persisted, including restrictions on freedoms of religion, assembly, and association, and torture and ill-treatment in custody,” it said.

Instead of addressing such criticisms, pro-government politicians chose to dismiss them. They were especially irked by Freedom House’s description of Armenia as “partly free” while their own country was “not free”.

“Freedom House and [other] international organisations are biased against Azerbaijan. They close their eyes to the fact that Armenia occupies some of our land,” Fazail Agamali, a member of parliament and head of the pro-government Ana Vatan party, said, referring to the Nagorny Karabakh, a de facto separate but unrecognised entity that emerged from conflict in the early 1990s.

“These organisations work for Armenia,” Agamali continued. “They describe the occupier as a partly free country, and the country that's suffering from occupation as not free. They want to use these mendacious, libellous ratings to put pressure on Azerbaijan.”

Agamali said the watchdog groups obtained their information from local non-government groups which they were funding, and failed to “check these lies with us, with the government”.

Human rights defenders in Azerbaijan said both Freedom House and Human Rights Watch were actually understating the extent of the problems in Azerbaijan.

“In Azerbaijan, the reality is that the political and civil rights situation has got much worse in recent years,” Arzu Abdullayeva of the Helsinki Citizens’ Assembly said. “Political parties are so much encroached upon that they cannot operate under normal conditions. Civil rights are violated quite blatantly every step of the way.”

Azerbaijani opposition parties lost their few remaining seats in parliament in the November election that the authorities insisted was free and fair, but which was criticised by international observers.

“The 2010 parliamentary election brought shame on Azerbaijan,” Abulfaz Qurbanli, head of the youth section of the opposition Popular Front party, said. “I can say for sure that parliament now consists of people put there by the president. They fixed the results to get the people they wanted into parliament.”

The last major anti-government protests in Azerbaijan were in November 2005, when police broke up demonstrations against that year’s parliamentary election outcome.

Since then, opposition activists say, their parties have been squeezed so hard that they are no longer able to campaign or raise funds.

Journalists who dare to criticise the authorities are jailed, and one – Eynulla Fatullayev – is still behind bars despite a successful appeal to the European Court of Human Rights.

A former activist with the Musavat party, who asked to remain anonymous, said it had become almost impossible to mount political campaigns against the government.

“They want to create an authoritarian regime of the kind that existed in Soviet times,” he said. “I had to leave the party for the sake of my children – the teachers were setting the other pupils against them, and calling them ‘children of the opposition’.”

Ramin Hajili of a youth civil rights group called Dalga, said the government would do well to take external criticism more seriously, and not simply dismiss it as Armenian-inspired propaganda.

“You can’t avoid the dirt on your face by breaking the mirror,” he said. “Political prisoners must be freed, and the rights of assembly, speech and property must be secured. Only by doing that can we improve the assessment we get from international organisations.”

Idrak Abbasov is a correspondent for the Zerkalo newspaper in Azerbaijan.