Azerbaijan's leaders like to pretend that they’re friends of the West. Time for a reality check.
By Altay Goyushov
a faculty member at Baku State University (Azerbaijan) and currently Reagan-Fascell Fellow at the National Endowment for Democracy.
Foreign Policy - December 6, 2014
Azerbaijan’s most famous investigative journalist Khadija Ismayilova
is the latest in a long list of Azerbaijani activists to become
political prisoners. Ismayilova, a journalist with Radio Free
Europe/Radio Liberty, has just been sentenced to two months of
administrative detention on charges of driving a fellow reporter to
attempt suicide, following, an accusation that observers called
“ridiculous.” Ismayilova, a long-term critic of the government who has
published numerous reports about official corruption, was denounced as a
“traitor” by the head of the presidential administration Ramiz Mehdiyev
in a lengthy anti-American treatise that appeared a day earlier.
The article denounces United States democracy assistance efforts as
undermining foreign states, and refers to domestic civic organizations
as a “fifth column.” Mehdiyev attacks Ismayilova by name, accusing her
and her collaborators of devising “anti-Azerbaijan programs” that are
“the equivalent of working for foreign security services.” In November,
Ismayilova was prevented from participating in a Helsinki Commission
hearing on corruption where she was supposed to testify, and earlier in
the year she was accused of leaking information to U.S. intelligence officials following a meeting with U.S. Senate staffers.
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