Archives for November 2022

By Harut Sassounian

The openDemocracy.net website published a critical article about BBC’s airing of a two-part propaganda film funded by the UK oil and gas giant British Petroleum (BP) about Azerbaijan. Written by James Dowsett, the article was titled, “BBC accused of ‘whitewashing’ autocratic Azerbaijan in BP-sponsored film.” BP has invested $84 billion in Azerbaijan since 1995 and is the largest foreign corporate investor in Azerbaijan’s oil operations.

The film was titled; ‘Wonders of Azerbaijan,’ leaving no doubt about its propagandistic purpose. It was produced with the backing of the ruling Aliyev family.

Azerbaijan is one of the most corrupt countries in the world. BBC is wrong to promote such a kleptocracy. BP “has long faced criticism from human rights and climate activists for its ties to the ruling Aliyev regime, which has been accused of ‘electoral fraud,’ the silencing of dissenting voices and benefiting disproportionately from Azerbaijan’s oil and gas wealth,” openDemocracy reported.

“BP spent $300,000 on the film, which was made by the UK production company SandStone Global with support from a foundation and a media center run by members of Azerbaijan’s ruling Aliyev family. Broadcaster and historian Bettany Hughes, who co-founded SandStone, presented the film,” openDemocracy wrote.

“Emin Huseynov, an Azerbaijani journalist who fled political persecution in Azerbaijan in 2015, accused the BBC of ‘whitewashing a dictatorship’ over the film,” wrote openDemocracy. Huseynov said BBC was giving “the floor to one of the bloodiest and most corrupt regimes in the world.”

Before its airing in August, BBC promoted the film by promising the viewers that they would discover “how Azerbaijan’s oil wealth enabled the capital Baku to flourish” and “gain the reputation of being the ‘Paris of the East.’”

In the film, Bettany Hughes travelled to Azeri-occupied Shushi, but did not say a single word about the city’s Armenian heritage. “The film also implicitly promoted Azerbaijan’s claims to Shusha [Shushi],” openDemocracy wrote. Azerbaijan has allocated millions of dollars to turn Shushi into its ‘cultural capital.’

A BBC spokesman tried to justify its objectionable transaction by telling openDemocracy that the revenue from airing the Azeri propaganda film “allows us to invest in the BBC’s world-class journalism, which provides independent and impartial news across all topics.” BBC’s ridiculous excuse is akin to a prostitute claiming that she donates to the church the money she makes from prostitution!

To generate additional income, BBC ran during the airing of the film travel ads paid by Azerbaijan’s official tourist board. The “Baku Media Center provided logistics support to SandStone, while the Heydar Aliyev Foundation helped the UK company secure filming permits and access to unique heritage sites,” a SandStone representative told openDemocracy. The Baku Media Center is run by Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev’s youngest daughter, Arzu Aliyeva. The Center works closely with the family-run Heydar Aliyev Foundation.

BP admitted that the propaganda film was its “contribution to Azerbaijan’s global promotion” in partnership with the Heydar Aliyev Foundation. The Foundation is chaired by Ilham Aliyev’s wife Mehriban Aliyeva, who is also the country’s vice president.

OpenDemocracy reported that “the Heydar Aliyev Foundation is tasked with promoting Azerbaijan’s image abroad, including by advancing the government position over Nagorno-Karabakh. But government critics say this work extends to diverting attention from the regime’s relentless crackdown on dissent and its systemic corruption.”

Arzu Geybullayeva, an Azerbaijani journalist living in exile, told openDemocracy: “The [Heydar Aliyev] Foundation was set up by the ruling family to whitewash Azerbaijan’s image. It can by no means be described as independent of the state.”

“The Heydar Aliyev Foundation is leading restoration works in Shusha [Shushi]. Some of these works [are] featured in the BBC program,” reported openDemocracy. Meanwhile, BP is planning a solar power plant in the city of Jabrayil, which Azerbaijan occupied in the 2020 war.

BP’s regional president Gary Jones “took to the stage at the Baku premiere of the film in late September to praise the ‘unwavering support of the [Azerbaijani] government’ for his company and its co-venturers’ operations in the country. Jones also spoke of the ‘joint effort’ that went into creating the documentary. He thanked the Heydar Aliyev Foundation for its support and paid personal homage to the president’s daughter, Arzu Aliyeva, and to the Baku Media Center she heads, ‘for their outstanding technical support’ on the production,” openDemocracy wrote.

Furthermore, “This isn’t the first time BP has collaborated with the Heydar Aliyev Foundation, or that the Foundation has cropped up on the BBC. Last year, BBC StoryWorks… ran a separate tourism-focused campaign for Azerbaijan to mark the 30th anniversary of the country’s independence from the Soviet Union. The campaign included a paid-for advertorial that invited readers to ‘discover more’ about Azerbaijan by following a link to an external website run by the Heydar Aliyev Foundation. The ‘Azerbaijan’ portal claims (among other things) that Azerbaijan’s current president Ilham Aliyev ‘has always focused on ensuring a fuller provision of human rights and freedoms in the country.’ It also contains information about the so-called ‘Armenian problem.’” However, the weblink was deleted after openDemocracy contacted BBC. The link had included scenes from a ‘war park’ in Baku where figures of Armenian soldiers with distorted faces were featured.

BP has signed a cooperation agreement with the Heydar Aliyev Foundation to jointly implement some of its social investment projects. “Previous joint projects have included sponsored films, such as ‘The Last Session’, a 2018 documentary commemorating the birth of the Azerbaijan Democratic Republic — the short-lived independent state that was ended by Soviet invasion in 1920. BP spent $320,000 on the project, which was organized by the Baku Media Center. Arzu Aliyeva was credited as the film’s executive producer,” openDemocracy reported.

@VickenSosikian

According to Vardanyan, while clearing the road for Nikol Pashinyan’s motorcade in Lori Province, motorcade police beat several citizens. The officers got into an argument with an elderly man who asked to be spoken to respectfully.

In an interview with Yerevan Today, one of the victims, the son of the elderly man, described the incident in detail. He explained that he, his brother and his underage nephew who also has asthma intervened in the conversation police were having with his elderly father. Then about a dozen police beat the two men and the minor nephew while also using tear gas on them. All three were then taken to the police station, where the beatings continued.

From there, ambulance rushed them to Vanadzor Hospital where they are being treated for severe injuries including punctured lungs and broken bones. No police investigation or a public response has been made yet. According to Vardanyan, even now that the case has received public attention, attempts are being made to exert pressure upon the victims and to give the impression that the victims provoked the dispute.

As the victims remain under medical care, this is now the second major incident involving Pashinyan directly. The first was the killing of Sona Mnatsakanyan and her unborn child – a hit/run Pashinyan motorcade incident whereby no single individual has yet been prosecuted.

By Jonathan Guyer,

Qatar is a player. In the Middle East and across the world, the petrostate of fewer than 3 million people plays an outsized role in politics, media, and art. Its cultural diplomacy has established the country’s influence — and now it’s doing the same with sport.

The country’s absurd wealth is on display this month: It spent about $300 billion on stadiums and groundwork to host the 2022 FIFA World Cup, which kicked off Sunday. That money totaled more than all previous World Cups and Olympics combined.

Qatar exports more liquified natural gas than any other country. Its energy resources have made the royal family among the world’s richest, and with a $335 billion sovereign wealth fund, it is one of the biggest landowners in the United Kingdom, and owns a major stake in the Empire State Building.

Yet Qatar has arguably been a more strategic spender than neighboring oil-rich states. It has focused on successfully constructing domestic cultural and educational institutions for Qataris and creating a national identity. But it’s a national identity presented by the royal family that does not tolerate dissent and does not guarantee human rights.

The achievement of the first World Cup being convened in the Arab world embodies those tensions: Qatar is a state that uses its immense wealth and power to elevate itself and the region, that cares deeply about culture, and yet has few freedoms.

Qatar’s elaborate hosting of the World Cup parallels its art prowess

Doha rapidly developed in recent decades from a small port to a dramatic cityscape in what Qatari artist Sophia Al-Maria describes as “Gulf Futurism.”

Yet for all its lavish spending and foreign-policy influence, Qatar has managed to avoid criticism over the years for restricting rights for women and LGBTQ people and labor violations, including relative silence from its Western allies. (It must help that it’s home to the largest US military base in the Middle East.)

The incredible development of World Cup arenas mirrors Qatar’s staggering art investments. The sister of Qatar’s emir and the head of its network of museums, Sheikha al-Mayassa bint Hamad bin Khalifa al-Thani, reportedly spends about $1 billion annually on art. That’s much higher than any major US museum.

Qatar has commissioned epic works by Western artists, like Richard Serra’s hulking steel plates in the desert (“East-West/West-East”) and Damien Hirst’s series of large bronze sculptures, some 46 feet high, of human reproduction from conception to embryo (“The Miraculous Journey”). Qatar has also bought some of the most expensive paintings in the world: Rothko’s “White Center” ($70 million), Cézanne’s “The Card Players” ($250 million), and Gauguin’s “When Will You Marry?” ($300 million).

There has been a huge emphasis on “starchitects” — largely American and European architects building outlandish structures that few other countries could afford, among them Rem Koolhaas and Jean Nouvel.

But Qatar, importantly, hasn’t only imported from the West.

It has created institutions that have helped forge its national identities as a Muslim and Arab country. The breathtakingly minimalist Museum of Islamic Art in Doha’s center, designed by famed architect I.M. Pei, contains a remarkable international collection. On the outskirts of Education City, among satellites of universities like Georgetown, Northwestern, and Virginia Commonwealth, is the Mathaf: Arab Museum of Modern Art, which contains one of the most extensive collections of 20th-century Arab art. (Qatar and the UAE are engaged in a cutthroat race to buy up Arab modern art from across the Middle East.) And part of the capital has a new downtown made to look old, called Msheireb, with many cultural museums including one focused on the country’s history of slavery.

“Qatar has always been much more connected, if you will, to that sense of their own past and their historical memory,” Kishwar Rizvi, a professor of art history and architecture at Yale University, told me. “There’s this global stage on which they want to present themselves,” she explained, but also a sense that, “We have oil, wealth, and all of that, but we also need cultural capital, because that also is part of what makes a nation.”

Perhaps because Qatar’s cultural investments have been so savvy, I’ve been taken aback by the ostentatiousness of its World Cup stadiums. One stadium is shaped like a traditional Qatari tent and another is made of shipping containers. Most of the marquee stadiums for world sporting events are showy or trying to represent the host country’s culture, but with this year’s, everything looks ornamental or too obvious.

Can cultural diplomacy thrive without human rights?

I visited Qatar in 2016 to attend a blue-chip conference of artists and architects, all presided over by Sheikha al-Mayassa. Conceptual artist Marina Abramović equated her and Qatar’s royal family to modern-day Medicis, with the funds to support artists like Serra in creating monumental works.

That money, it seems, does buy the complicity of powerful people. “To just come and criticize, it’s such an easy way to close the culture forever, but I want to open this culture,” Abramović told me.

On the sidelines of the swish confab at the W Hotel Doha, I interviewed Jeff Koons, one of the world’s most expensive living artists and a frequent guest of the royal family. I asked him: Why Qatar? “I would say because of the openness of Qatar to ideas, to education, to the humanities, to psychology and philosophy and all the different things that can stimulate the public for growth and development,” he told me.

I pushed Koons to discuss reported labor violations, that his nudes could never be exhibited in the conservative country, and the fact that a Qatari poet was imprisoned at the time for a protest song. “Going back to some of the problems here in Qatar and these different things, I’m naïve of some of the aspects,” Koons told me. “I know that internationally there has been a movement to try to make working conditions better for laborers, and I think that a lot of problems, not only here but internationally, have been addressed to try to make situations where, if abuses take place, they’re corrected.”

Qatar is a monarchy with a large expat and migrant labor population that has very limited rights. Migrant workers can’t join labor unions. The Guardian has reported that 6,500 migrant workers died over a decade, and a Kenyan blogger who wrote about it was arrested in 2021.

Beyond that, women are stifled by guardianship laws, LGBTQ people lack rights, and internet activists have been imprisoned. The courts are not independent, the press cannot freely cover the country’s politics, and there are no serious elections for leadership and no political parties.

“If you’re in Qatar, and your rights are trampled on as a woman or as a queer person or anything, if you don’t like it, you’re just thrown into jail and good luck,” Wafa Ben-Hassine, a human rights attorney based in Washington, DC, told me. “It’s like you have certain rights and freedoms only if you belong to a certain class of protected people” — the wealthy or certain expats — “then they become not human rights.”

Qatar has largely eluded scrutiny over the years. Now that the country is getting so much attention, there have been some articles criticizing a double standard that Qatar is being held to. But Ben-Hassine said that scrutiny is merited.

“I’m happy that an Arab nation is hosting one of the most lucrative spectacles in the world,” Ben-Hassine said. “But it can be better, and it should do better. We should be clear-eyed about the state of affairs that this country has and aim to hold it to the highest standards.”

And it’s not just about Qatar. It’s about the world systems in which Qatar operates, and the ways in which the tournament serves Western interests, as Guardian columnist Nesrine Malik writes, at the expense of those who lack rights in Qatar.

Nasser Rabbat, a professor of Islamic architecture at MIT, put it this way: “I don’t want to absolve the patrons, the contractors, and the builders, from the amazing human rights violations they have sustained all these years. I’m not going to come to the defense of any of these countries in saying that their labor treatment is acceptable. It is absolutely unacceptable. But I’m not going to blame them as well.”

“Because, at the end of the day, those who are making the most amount of money from the construction boom in the Gulf are companies from our part of the world, from the United States and from Europe,” Rabbat told me. “They are responsible for the deaths of hundreds, if not thousands, of workers, but we too are responsible for those deaths. And we too have benefited from those deaths.”

So the World Cup — with the blitz of global media and the arrival of a million visitors — exposes Qatar to new pressures from the outside. In welcoming teams and fans from around the globe, the cameras may reveal the country’s limitations. Qatar’s deep investments in culture can’t shield it from criticism for the shallowness of rights there.

Source: https://www.vox.com/world/23475120/qatar-wealth-rich-2022-fifa-world-cup-human-rights?sponsored=0&position=1&scheduled_corpus_item_id=5ce82b16-9ba7-4f1a-bec9-ecc4049d0a43

Koryun Simonyan,

According to the former judge of the Constitutional Court, Alvina Gylumyan, judgments regarding the constitutionality of a possible “peace” treaty can be made when their content is known. Until now,

there are 2 versions being discussed: the Russian version and the American version, and according to popular information, the Russian version, the issue of Artsakh is left for the future, and in the case of the American version, there is no mention of Artsakh at all. According to Gyulumyan, it is worrying that if they are not even constitutional, then in what way will it be possible to prevent their ratification?

“I would refrain from evaluating them, it’s like looking for a cat in the front room. We haven’t read those 2 agreements, if any, and don’t know what they actually say. Even the title gives cause for doubt, we don’t know what title it will have, because according to our Constitution there are contracts that must go through a mandatory ratification process, we need to know what kind of contract it is. In order for the impeachment process to pass, the conclusion of the Constitutional Court must also be on its constitutionality. Now, will they be constitutional or not? I repeat, we should be familiar with those wordings, but in the conditions of the questions you mentioned: renunciation of Artsakh, etc., in these conditions, in the case of the existing Constitution, we should not forget the preamble of the Constitution. the legal force of which was referred to by the Constitutional Court both before and more recently by this composition of the Constitutional Court. I am more concerned with the next question, even if we accept that it is not constitutional, if we proceed from that presumption, what possible means do we have to prevent its ratification? This is where a question arises. whether today’s Supreme Court will go so far as to recognize it as inconsistent with the Constitution, or if the Supreme Court finds, based on purely legal wordings, that… and there has been this practice in the past, when the Supreme Court finds that our obligations there is no issue of constitutionality, that is, we discuss the compliance of the obligations with the constitution and find that there is no such issue, but the expediency of ratification is the task of the National Assembly. Now, in the presence of such a decision, will today’s National Assembly go to him, so as not to find it politically expedient to ratify it? In general, in any case, when the ruling majority has a so-called stable majority, when it has enough votes to make a decision, it is difficult to say under these conditions,” Gylumyan said.

To the question of “Hraparak”, what days are expected for the judges, taking into account that Karen Andreasyan, who is one of the supporters of vetting, has become the president of the BSC, and previously stated that there are corrupt judges in the system. Gyulumyan recalled the example of changing the composition of the CC.

“You know what, no one could say that the judges of the Constitutional Court were corrupt, and I don’t think that even with the so-called low threshold of the public’s confidence in the judiciary, the Constitutional Court could not do anything in that regard. to say. However, there was a desire to change it, and it was changed.”

According to the former judge of the CC, judges should not give way during their activity so that they can be pressured, the society also has something to do.

“Firstly, judges should not give any reason during their activities, so that it is possible for them to… and secondly, the society should be able to appreciate a good judge and stand in the positions of his protection. We have such examples when, for example, in Poland, the public rose up, when there was an attack on the courts, but our political culture is such that often even the current political power, the executive and sometimes even the legislator, try to choose a scapegoat for the problems that have arisen in the society. and often it is the courts.’

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Azerbaijani Armed Forces continue shelling civilians in Artsakh, preventing them from carrying out agricultural work.

At 11.55 p.m. on November 25 the resident of the Karmir Shuka community of the Martuni region of Artsakh S. Grigoryan applied to the Artsakh police station for an interview. Grigoryan applied to the department of the same community of the district police department with a report that on the same day at about 11:30 in the administrative territory of Tagavard village when performing agricultural works on the tractor Belarus he came under indiscriminate fire from the enemy positions, as a result of which the agricultural works were stopped.

The Artsakh Ministry of Internal Affairs reports that in the morning of November 25, the enemy violated the ceasefire regime in the direction of the village of Chankatagh of the Martakert region. Azerbaijani Armed Forces fired at civilians, preventing them from carrying out agricultural work.

Employees of district police departments collected and handed over facts to the Russian peacekeeping contingent.