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Merkel And Aliyev Hold ‘Open’ Talks On Human Rights In Azerbaijan

August 31, 2018 By administrator

Merkel meeting with rights activists and the prominent Azerbaijani investigative journalist Khadija Ismayilova, a former RFE/RL contributor.

German Chancellor Angela Merkel held what she called “intensive” discussions with Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev in talks that addressed energy cooperation, human rights, and the conflict between Azerbaijan and Armenia over the disputed Nagorno-Karabakh region.

The meeting between Merkel and Aliyev in the Azerbaijani capital, Baku, on August 25 included a discussion of the human rights situation in the South Caucasus nation that the German chancellor said was conducted in an “open atmosphere,” Merkel’s spokesman, Steffen Seibert, said on Twitter.

Critics accuse Aliyev’s government of carrying out a targeted crackdown on dissent in recent years, though the Azerbaijani leader has repeatedly rejected such criticism.

“We discussed the issue of the domestic situation in Azerbaijan and addressed human rights, also in a very open atmosphere,” Merkel said, according to a transcript of her press conference with Aliyev released by her office.

“We did not find common ground on all issues. But I argued that a strong civil society must be part of an open, secular society and made clear that we would like to see this strong civil society,” Merkel added.

Merkel’s stop in Baku on August 25 — the final leg of a three-day tour to South Caucasus that included visits to Georgia and Armenia — also included a meeting with rights activists and the prominent Azerbaijani investigative journalist Khadija Ismayilova, a former RFE/RL contributor.

Ismayilova, who spent nearly 18 months in jail on charges widely viewed as retaliation for her investigative reporting before her release in May 2016, wrote on Facebook following the meeting that she spoke to Merkel “about corruption and how it undermines peace, democracy, and security in Azerbaijan.”

“I asked to be more outspoken on human rights and democracy issues because people here need to see examples of European politicians who aren’t silenced by corruption money,” she wrote.

Merkel “said our concerns are important and some have been addressed in the meeting she had with President Aliyev. I hope to hear more from her,” Ismayilova wrote.

Azerbaijan’s opposition, as well as Western officials and international human rights groups, have accused Aliyev’s government of persecuting opposition politicians, activists, independent media outlets, and journalists, often using what they allege are trumped-up criminal charges.

Aliyev, who has repeatedly shrugged off accusations of corruption and stifling dissent, defended his government’s record on human rights during an August 25 news conference alongside Merkel, saying Baku “is committed to democratic values.”

“All democratic institutions exist in Azerbaijan. All the liberties have been provided, in particular, freedom of speech, freedom of the press. There are hundreds of media outlets in Azerbaijan, including opposition media. Thereby, no one is being persecuted for the criticism [of the authorities] or for the [critical] views in Azerbaijan,” Aliyev said.

The two leaders also discussed energy cooperation between Europe and Azerbaijan, where Aliyev has ruled the nation of almost 10 million people with an iron fist since 2003.

Addressing a business roundtable in Baku on August 25, Merkel described Azerbaijan as “an important partner in the diversification of our energy supply within the European Union,” according to a transcript released by her office.

Nagorno-Karabakh

Merkel also said that Berlin could assist in mediating the conflict between Azerbaijan and Armenia over the disputed Nagorno-Karabakh region.

“Germany wants to help find peaceful solutions,” Merkel told reporters, adding that the conflict over the mountainous territory is a significant burden on the region.

The region, populated mainly by ethnic Armenians, declared independence from Azerbaijan amid a 1988-94 war that claimed an estimated 30,000 lives and displaced hundreds of thousands of people.

Since 1994, Nagorno-Karabakh has been under the control of ethnic Armenian forces which Baku says include troops supplied by Armenia. The region’s claim to independence has not been recognized by any country.

Internationally mediated negotiations involving the so-called Minsk Group of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) helped forge a cease-fire in the region, which is not always honored, but have failed to produce a lasting settlement of the conflict.

In Yerevan a day earlier, Merkel told reporters that “it is important that the conflict is resolved peacefully” and that Germany “stands ready” to contribute to a solution.

Merkel noted that Germany is a member of the OSCE’s Minsk Group and that “we stand ready to assume responsibility within the framework of the Karabakh settlement process.”

With reporting by DPA, Azernews, DW.com, and TASS

Filed Under: News Tagged With: Khadija Ismayilova, meeting, Merkel

Letter from Azerbaijan prison “Don’t let Azerbaijan use political prisoners as props”

April 11, 2016 By administrator

Khadija Ismayilova, a reporter for Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, was convicted of several financial crimes and sentenced to 7½ years in prison in a case criticized by human rights organizations. (Aziz Karimov/Associated Press)

Khadija Ismayilova, a reporter for Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, was convicted of several financial crimes and sentenced to 7½ years in prison in a case criticized by human rights organizations. (Aziz Karimov/Associated Press)

By Khadija Ismayilova 

(washingtonpost) Khadija Ismayilova is an investigative journalist and contributor to Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty’s Azerbaijani service. She has been imprisoned in Azerbaijan since December 2014.

I am writing this letter from jail in Baku, Azerbaijan, where I’m serving a 7½ -year sentence for a crime I never committed.

I am a journalist and my only “crime” was to investigate high-level corruption within the government and family of Azeri President Ilham Aliyev . Aliyev inherited power from his father in 2003 and changed the constitution in 2009 so he could stay in power indefinitely. He has been called an enemy of the press by international watchdogs, while abusing other fundamental freedoms and violating people’s right to truth and decency.

Aliyev is in Washington this week to attend the Nuclear Security Summit that began Thursday. To get an invitation to this event from President Obama, he had to pardon several political prisoners. A lthough they have been released from jail, they remain confined within the country, barred from leaving, and justice has not been restored.

This is a very costly invitation for Aliyev, who for years refused to accept international pressure or criticism on this issue. His response was, always, that Azerbaijan doesn’t have political prisoners. In December, Rep. Christopher H. Smith (R-N.J.) introduced the Azerbaijan Democracy Act to recognize Azerbaijan’s violations of human rights and freedoms and to hold individual officials accountable. It must pass.

But why were some of the political prisoners suddenly set free? What has changed?

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Aliyev needed these prisoners so that in exchange for their release, he could shake hands with Obama or get a loan from the World Bank to finance his failing currency and crippled economy after the sudden fall of oil prices.

Aliyev is shamelessly trying to use political prisoners as bargaining chips to advance his foreign policy agenda. And they are supposed to be happy that they were freed.

I am happy — very happy — that some political prisoners have been released. But their fights, and mine, are not over. I am not a toy to be exchanged for diplomatic gain by Baku or Washington so that officials can continue to pretend that it is business as usual. We are hostages of the regime, whether we are inside or outside of prison. Freedom is my universal and constitutional right, and Aliyev failed to protect it as the head of state. I am not going to ask to be pardoned for a crime I never committed. I am free even now, in jail, and my freedom is not for sale.

So President Obama, please ask President Aliyev to stop muzzling the independent media and civil society. Ask him to explain the billions of petrodollars wasted on white-elephant projects for the benefit of a few. Ask him when he is going to hold free and fair elections. Ask him when he is going to let all the political prisoners go free. Ask him when fundamental freedoms can become a right, in practice — not a gift that he can give or take away. I asked these questions, and I ended up in jail.

These are important questions. They must not go unanswered. And we will fight until justice is fully served.

Read more on this issue:

Khadija Ismayilova: A letter from an Azerbaijani priso

Filed Under: Articles Tagged With: Azerbaijan, Khadija Ismayilova, letter, Prison

Azerbaijani Jailed journalist Khadija Ismayilova RFE/RL Contributor Wins UN Press Prize

April 8, 2016 By administrator

83414BA6-3ED5-4CB1-94BC-7939A405F1DB_w268_r1By RFE/RL, 

Imprisoned Azerbaijani journalist Khadija Ismayilova has won a UN press award for “her outstanding contribution to press freedom in difficult circumstances.”

Ismayilova, an investigative journalist and RFE/RL contributor, was selected to receive the 2016 UNESCO/Guillermo Cano World Press Freedom Prize.

“Khadija Ismayilova highly deserves the prize and I am happy to see that her courage and professionalism are recognized,” said Ljiljana Zurovac, president of the UNESCO/Guillermo Cano World Press Freedom Prize 2016 Jury.

The $25,000 prize is named in honor of Guillermo Cano Isaza, a Colombian journalist who was assassinated in front of the offices of his newspaper, El Espectador, in Bogota on December 17, 1986.

Ismayilova is currently in prison on embezzlement and tax-evasion charges widely believed to be retribution for her reports on corruption involving senior government officials.

Filed Under: Articles Tagged With: Khadija Ismayilova, Wins UN Press Prize

OCCRP: Story of Azerbaijani journalist Khadija Ismayilova exposing Aliyev clan corruption

June 26, 2015 By administrator

journalist Khadija Ismayilova

journalist Khadija Ismayilova

Over the past decade, the investigative reporter and commentator for Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty (RFE/RL) and regional coordinator and partner for the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project (OCCRP), Khadija Ismayilova, had been shaking things up by exposing government corruption. More recently, she was zeroing in on the activities of President Ilham Aliyev and his clan. She has said that she never set out to target them; their names just kept cropping up in her investigations. Along the way, she started getting clear warnings —warnings other journalists might have heeded. Ismayilova knew that they were telling her to keep her nose out of places it did not belong. But for her, running was not an option, American journalist Don Ray writes on OCCRP website https://www.occrp.org/freekhadijaismayilova/stories/the-making-of-an-investigative-reporter.php.

The more she dug, the clearer the picture became. Her investigations documented the outright plundering of the Azerbaijani treasury: the ruling clan seemed to be leveraging personal control of the former Soviet state’s transportation system, banks, government mining operations and more. The more she uncovered and reported, the more the government tried to close off the access to key information. When that did not stop Ismayilova, the threats of personal attacks began — outrageous, demeaning and humiliating attacks. Ismayilova told them she would not stop, so they followed through by releasing hidden camera video of her most intimate moments. The ploy backfired, however, and turned public sentiment in her favor, she said. Next they arrested her on what her employers, supporters and leading journalism organizations consider to be ludicrous, trumped-up charges, Ray writes.

He points that nearly a decade earlier, it had been the assassination of the journalist Elmar Huseynov that inspired the then-28-year-old reporter to devote her life to exposing corruption, consequences be damned. Huseynov used to publish a very critical and independent magazine, ‘Monitor,’ which highlighted high-level corruption cases and the President’s clan being involved in corrupt practices. Ismayilova realized that he had been working on topics that were difficult to report and he often failed to get all of the key documents to prove his stories. “But he was telling the truth to people,” she said. After Huseynov’s death, she vowed to help pick up where Huseynov had left off.

Until 2009, Ismayilova says, the media were still very quiet in Azerbaijan because of continued attacks on reporters who were writing critical stories. But that year, she began helping Washington Post writer Andrew Higgins work on a story about the president’s clan owning expensive real estate properties in Dubai. Publishing that story broke the silence. Nobody denied that the Aliyevs owned the property. “Before that, we had journalists saying, ‘Oh, this government, president — they are thieves.’ It was all their own opinions — never facts. And now we had facts to talk about — facts to refer to,” Ismayilova highlighted.

According to Ray, Ismayilova and her fellow reporters learned from OCCRP how to fish for offshore companies connected to the Aliyev clan. They started digging into bank privatization records relating to the state airline company. They discovered that, in the mix of privatization, one of the representatives of the clan ended up being one of the owners of Silk Way bank.

In August 2010, Ismayilova and fellow reporter Ulviyye Asadzade broke the story. “They broke the law to become a bank owner,” Ismayilova said. “We published this story, proving every sentence there.” The bank was part of a larger, recently privatized company that enjoyed a near-complete monopoly over every aspect of airline service businesses. There was no comment from the government about the story. However, the Aliyev regime began trying to silence the voices that were not under its control.

Ray notes that for nearly a century, from 1920 until 1991, when Azerbaijan was part of the Soviet Union, the Azerbaijani people had little or no access to news stories that were critical of the government. Since 1991, when Azerbaijan gained its independence, journalism has not improved much, Ismayilova said. The government fully controls the broadcast media and the handful of newspapers have low circulation and poor distribution. “So basically, there is no independent media in Azerbaijan,” Ismayilova said. “Most of it is still propaganda, but it’s propaganda of the regime.”

According to the article, Ilham Aliyev became president on October 15, 2003, two months before the death of his predecessor Heydar Aliyev who had been a high-level official in the Soviet KGB. In 1969, Soviet Premier Leonid Brezhnev appointed the senior Aliyev to the post of First Secretary of the Central Committee of Azerbaijan Communist Party, as an enforcer in a Soviet anti-corruption campaign. Two decades later, Mikhail Gorbachev forced Heydar Aliyev to resign from a high-level position in the Soviet Politburo because of allegations of corruption. The elder Aliyev became the president of the Azerbaijan Republic in 1993, and won reelection in 1998, despite allegations of voter fraud and corruption.

Before his death in 2003, he had already put his son, Ilham, in a position that would ensure he would succeed him. Ilham Aliyev garnered 76.84 percent of the votes. He won a second term in 2008 with 87 percent of the vote, thanks in part to the opposition parties boycotting the election, Ray points.

Aliyev’s administration orchestrated a constitutional referendum that abolished term limits for the president and inflicted severe restrictions on freedom of the press. “We had BBC, Voice of America and Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty,” Ismayilova said, “but they all were banned on local frequencies in 2009. The government of Azerbaijan doesn’t want its citizens to listen to this news, because they were not able to control the content.” The foreign broadcasters turned more to the Internet to reach the people of Azerbaijan, although much of the population had no online access.

In June 2011, Ismayilova proved that Aliyev clan representatives were the main shareholders of Azerfon, then Azerbaijan’s only provider of 3G mobile phone services. A few years earlier, everyone had believed what the government had announced — that Azerfon belonged to the German firm Siemens A.G. and a couple of British firms.

According to Don Ray, in early 2011, Ismayilova discovered that one of energy corporations was involved in a controversial construction contract the president referred to as a “patriotic project.” “It was building the highest flagpole in the world,” Ismayilova said. “The Azerbaijani flag would be on it.” But it turned out to be a short-lived glory. Just six months later, Tajikistan – another “stupid country” – built a taller one, she says. Ismayilova says she discussed the project on her radio program, and later she would learn from Wikileaks documents that the country’s leader was not happy with her. “President Aliyev named me an enemy of the state for making fun of this project on the air,” she said.

According to the article, Ismayilova says she was still investigating the story on March 7, 2011, when she received a blackmail letter. She had no doubt that it came from someone in the Azerbaijani government. “I received this package which contained a note saying, ‘You whore. Behave or you will be defamed.’” It included intimate photographs that were still images that came from a hidden camera footage from her bedroom. “I knew that this is how they want to stop me,” Ismayilova said.

[12:53:18] KENTRON — Elibegova Anzhela: She ignored the advice of colleagues who told her not to do her radio show that afternoon. She was sure the blackmailers were listening to her that day. Next, she posted a public statement on Facebook under the headline: “This is how I answer the blackmailers.” “I said I’m not going to stop any of my investigations and I said I’m not going to shut up. I’m not ashamed of anything in my life, I’m not ashamed of anything I’ve been doing, and if they think that they shamed me — and that will stop me — they’re wrong,” she wrote.

She says she filed a complaint with the prosecutor’s office, but it did not stop the blackmailers from posting the video of her and her boyfriend on a website that the blackmailers had created to look like it belonged to an opposition party. “In a country where honor killings are still taking place, in a country where women are not entitled to have sex before marriage, in a country where this kind of behavior, like having a boyfriend, having an apartment and living by yourself, is considered as going against traditions,” she said, “I received full support from society.”

She says it did not surprise her that the prosecutor’s office said it was never able to identify who had put the secret video cameras in her apartment. “I had no doubts about who did it — who ordered it —but I wanted to know how did it happen.” She was able to figure out the camera angle and quickly discovered phone wires where the camera in her bedroom had been. She followed the wires to the living room and also to the bathroom. “That was a shock,” she said. “And the week after, I couldn’t go to the bathroom. I had this feeling that somebody is watching.”

According to the article, she followed the wires to a telephone box outside that belonged to the state-run telephone company. She demanded that the prosecutor’s office call whoever installed the line. Being rejected, she herself called to the telephone company to send a service member. The man who arrived looked at it and said he remembered installing it in July of 2011 because he was told the client needed another phone line.

In the meantime, she continued working on her investigative stories. She had teamed up with her former student, Nushabe Fatullayeva who had been doing some curious digging of her own. On May 2, 2012, the two journalists documented a paper trail that proved that a lucrative contract to mine government gold had gone to a company in the United Kingdom — a company that was actually owned by a Panama corporation. Ismayilova and Fatullayeva showed that Aliyev clan representatives were the secret owners. Six days later, Ismayilova found that the clan was involved in the building of a US$134 million concert venue called the Crystal Hall to host and showcase the 2012 Eurovision Song Contest in Baku. One of the builders was a company of which the president’s clan was a secret owner, according to Ray’s article.

That same year, Azerbaijan’s National Assembly passed legislation that required a court order to find out who owns what in Azerbaijan, and, just to be safe, the law grants lifelong criminal immunity to all ex-Presidents and ex-First Ladies. The new laws only apply to companies in Azerbaijan, so Ismayilova and OCCRP colleagues Pavla Holcova and Jaromir Hason dug through property records in the Czech Republic. In October of 2011, the team reported that Azerbaijani officials, including the ruling clan, had formed corporations in Prague, purchased land, and built hotels and villas in luxurious places such as the famous spa city of Karlovy Vary, Ray points.

Ismayilova broke another corruption story in late June 2014, when she wrote about media mogul Sona Veliyeva, who is married to Ali Hasanov, an influential government official — an official with power to make policy regarding freedom of speech, political liberties and the media. Quite often, Ismayilova wrote, President Aliyev would make decrees that prevented outside networks or productions from airing video inside Azerbaijan. To fill the video vacuum, Hasanov would dole out contracts to local producers, including the companies his own wife owned. In all, Ismayilova connected a dozen such media companies to Hasanov’s wife, according to Ray’s article.

Ismayilova also proved that the Aliyev clan was working its way toward a near monopoly of the telecom industry. Before she could provide more details on the story, authorities arrested her on December 5, 2014. She has been in prison since, Ray writes.

Azerbaijani journalist Khadija Ismayilova: Exposing TeliaSonera’s scandalous bribery is reason for my arrest
Azerbaijani journalist Khadija Ismayilova jailed for criticizing authorities wins Anna Politkovskaya Award

Source: Panorama.am

Filed Under: News Tagged With: Aliyev, Azerbaijan, corruption, Khadija Ismayilova

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