Azerbaijan: Shrugging off criticism over media arrests
Baku forcing the West to make a clear choice.
Azerbaijan is stiff-arming the West over criticism of a crackdown on independent media. Baku’s toughening attitude creates potential complications for efforts to expand energy exports and trade via the developing middle corridor.
The latest wave in the crackdown on the free flow of information broke on March 6 with the arrest of employees of Toplum TV. Two additional arrests were made three days later.
The March 6 arrests occurred just hours after the German television network ARD aired a documentary alleging Azerbaijan’s involvement in buying influence among European and German politicians. The documentary featured Toplum TV’s chief editor, Khadija Ismail, discussing current affairs in Azerbaijan, including allegations of top-level corrupt practices and the media crackdown.
A Voice of America report quoted Ismail, who was not taken into custody, as saying the Toplum arrests were politically motivated. “They [authorities] are trying to darken the country. They will likely continue the wave of repression until all sources of light in the country are closed,” said Ismail, who herself was arrested in 2014 and spent over a year in prison after reporting on corruption within President Ilham Aliyev’s administration.
In a March 11 statement, Toplam TV employees who were not taken into custody pledged to keep producing news. “Toplum TV and its employees are only engaged in journalism and have not taken any steps that could be the basis for any criminal case,” the statement read.
The move to silence Toplum TV sparked a chorus of condemnation from Western watchdog groups and governmental agencies.
“Azerbaijani authorities must immediately end the growing crackdown on human rights and independent media and respect, protect, promote and fulfill the human rights of everyone including the right to freedom of expression and media freedom,” Amnesty International said in a statement.
Freedom House called the crackdown on the Toplum TV “the Aliyev regime’s latest unacceptable attack on critical, independent voices in the country.” Meanwhile, US State Department spokesman Matthew Miller said Washington was “deeply troubled” by the crackdown. In addition to the Toplum TV arrests, journalists from other independent outlets, including Abzas Media, Kanal 13 and Kanal 11, have been taken into custody over the past few months, most of them charged with smuggling.
“We call on Azerbaijan to end the harassment of those exercising their fundamental freedoms and urge the release of all individuals being unjustly held in politically motivated cases,” Miller said.
Such talk is falling on deaf ears in Baku.
Puffed up with hubris over Azerbaijan’s reconquest of Nagorno-Karabakh, commentaries published by state-affiliated media outlets in Azerbaijan effectively told Western critics to shut up. One went so far as to say Azerbaijan was engaged in a non-shooting conflict with the United States and European Union.
“Outlets like Toplum and Abzas see themselves in line with countries who are Azerbaijan’s enemies, and participate in an information war that they wage against our homeland as allies,” veteran pro-government journalist Mirshahin Aghayev of Real TV said on his program. “Azerbaijan won a brilliant victory in one war, restoring its territorial integrity and sovereignty. Now we are forced to engage in another war – it is an information war that countries like the US and France, and institutions like PACE and the Council of Europe have declared against Azerbaijan.”
“We will win this war, too,” Aghayev added. Elsewhere, a prominent news agency APA published a report claiming that Toplum TV received more than half a million dollars from overseas to support anti-government programming.
In comments to Eurasianet, Arzu Geybulla, a human rights researcher, described Baku’s media crackdown "as an act of revenge" against international criticism of Azerbaijan in recent months on a variety of issues.
The hardening rhetoric creates an optics challenge for Western diplomacy, making it increasingly difficult for Washington and Brussels to turn a blind eye to authoritarian abuses in Baku at a time when the West is working with Azerbaijani officials to expand energy exports and East-West trade routes.
US and EU leaders badly want to tap into more Caspian Basin oil and natural gas exports to reduce a dependency on Russian energy. Following a round of high-level discussions in Washington in late February, Azerbaijani Energy Minister Parviz Shahbazov announced the two countries had agreed to work on expanding three pipelines connecting Azerbaijan to Europe.
Azerbaijan is also a key node in new trade routes bypassing Russia that the US and EU are intent on developing. The new network is just starting to take shape. On March 11, for instance, Kazakhstan’s president, Kassym-Jomart Tokayev, visited Azerbaijan to attend a ceremony welcoming a Europe-bound train of 61 containers that originated in China and transited Kazakhstan before crossing the Caspian Sea.
After securing a rigged reelection in early February, some Azerbaijani observers expected Aliyev to try to mend fences with the EU, but the exact opposite has occurred. The Azerbaijani government’s actions are challenging the EU and other Western institutions to make a clear choice about what is more important to them – access to energy or individual rights. Aliyev is clearly betting that oil outweighs the fundamental principles underlying Western democracy.
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