The Voice of Mirza Xazar

Mina Muradova and Khazri Bakinsky: 5/30/07

An ambitious infrastructure upgrade campaign has taken Azerbaijan by storm in recent months, but some economists point to the 2008 presidential vote as the prime reason for the state-funded building boom and question the projects’ transparency.

Infrastructure projects will account for a staggering 87 percent of this year’s government investment programs, recently revised to total $2.2 billion (1.9 billion manats), according to Oktai Ahverdiyev, chief of the Cabinet of Ministers’ finance department.

Under this plan, by the end of 2007, Azerbaijan will have five new airports – some in the remotest parts of the country. Aside from existing international airports in the western town of Ganja, Azerbaijan’s second largest metropolitan area, and the exclave of Nakhchivan (bordering Armenia and Iran), an international airport is planned for the southern town of Lenkoran, close to the Iranian border. Airports in Sheki, a popular tourist destination in northern Azerbaijan, and Zaqatala, a small nearby town, will handle smaller planes. The cost for these facilities has not been made public.

Extensive highway and bridge projects are also in the works. In 2007, the government plans to spend $500 million on the construction and repair of highways – a figure that is 80 percent higher than 2006 expenditures, APA news agency reported, citing the Ministry of Transportation. Ten new bridges and 18 underpasses are planned for Baku to lessen the city’s growing traffic congestion. In addition, repairs will be carried out on 40 bridges between Baku and the Russian border, and a new highway will be built from the Azerbaijani capital to the Iranian border.

At an opening ceremony for one of Baku’s new bridges in March, President Aliyev declared that the bridge building shows Azerbaijan’s economic muscle. “It means that we are becoming strong,” media outlets reported him as stating. The 200 million manat ($232 million) allocated for the bridges and underpasses “will not be to make a profit,” he elaborated, stressing that “[a]ll of this is done for the people’s welfare.”

Senior government official Ahverdiyev has stated that “poverty reduction” will also be included in the campaign. Planned expenditures will target improvement of “the water supply, sanitation systems, education [system] and healthcare,” Aheverdiyev told Trend news agency recently.

Some questions, however, surround the details.

"Azerbaijan’s infrastructure needs to improve, but first it should be seriously studied to define priority highways and bridges [for work], which of them can really eliminate problems with traffic jams,” argued economist Azer Mehtiyev, deputy chairman of Baku’s non-governmental Center for Economic Research. Money for these improvements has so far been allocated without such a hit list, he added.

That leaves particular questions about the viability of the five new airports, observed Zohrab Ismaylov, head of the non-governmental Center for Market Economy Assistance in Baku. "I am not sure that airports in Zaqatala or Lenkoran can give a profit even in the mid-term future," Ismaylov said. Zaqatala has a population of around 26,000 people, according to official statistics. Lenkoran’s population stands at under 50,000. Both towns are in non-industrial areas with no emphasis on exports.

Both Mekhtiyev and Ismaylov, however, contend that the large-scale investment projects have as much to do with the 2008 presidential elections as they do with infrastructure improvements.

Decisions about the infrastructure projects “come suddenly during [Aliyev’s] trips to the regions and in meetings with residents,” observed the Center for Economic Research’s Mehtiyev. “There is no clear… policy."

Mehtiyev holds that the construction projects will be used to let Aliyev show that he has met a 2003 presidential campaign promise to create 600,000 new jobs by 2008. At an April 13 speech to government ministers, Aliyev reported that 535,000 jobs – the majority allegedly permanent and outside of Baku – have been set up during his time in office.

Public tenders for the projects have also not been held, a fact that has spurred concerns that money for the projects, derived from Azerbaijan’s sizeable oil income, is being misappropriated. Mehtiyev charges that companies “close to high-level officials” act as project contractors; Ismaylov of the Center for Market Economy Assistance claims that a recent 371 million manat (about $369 million) increase in state investments was approved by parliamentarians without detailed information about the funds’ intended use.

"From the point of view of efficiency and of transparency in spending oil revenues, the construction industry is not the best sphere," Ismaylov stressed. Many construction companies are unregistered and operate wtihout paying taxes, he noted.

One pro-opposition political analyst agreed. “[Information about] implementation of these projects is closed to the public,” charged Rasim Musabekov. “It is out of public control and gives the government an opportunity to misappropriate oil revenues.”

Government officials could not be reached for commentary.

But for President Aliyev, what matters is that signs of change are beginning to appear.

“New business have opened, roads are paved, neighborhoods improved and modernized,” the Azerbaijani leader told reporters in April. “The main goal is to reduce the gap [in living standards] between urban and rural population centers. And we can achieve this.”

Editor’s Note: Mina Muradova and Khazri Bakinsky are freelance reporters in Baku.

(www.eurasianet.org)

A series of arrests and prison sentences for charges that include terrorism have journalists in Azerbaijan wondering if there is any sort of future for a free press.

Commentary by Karl Rahder for ISN Security Watch (25/05/07)

Increasingly bad news for freedom of expression has recently come out of Azerbaijan, the US' oil-rich ally in the Caspian Sea region, where five journalists have been sentenced to harsh prison sentences in the last few weeks in what critics say is a government campaign to stifle free speech.

Rafiq Tagi, a journalist with the independent newspaper Senet was sentenced on 3 May in Baku, the capital, to a four-year term for “inciting religious hatred,” while his editor Samir Sadagatoglu received a three-year sentence.

The prison terms and prosecution came as a result of a commentary written last November by Tagi entitled “Europe and Us,” which according to press reports compared Muslim societies such as Azerbaijan with historically Christian Europe and concluded that Islam had, on the whole, hindered social and political development.

While this sort of reflective social commentary might be the norm in the West, the outcry from some quarters in secular, Shi’ite Azerbaijan was shrill, with ultra-conservative Muslims in the village of Nadaran calling for the two men’s deaths and the public prosecutor bringing criminal charges against them.

In neighboring Iran, Grand Ayatollah Fazel Lankarani has issued a fatwa calling for the execution of Tagi and his editor, saying on his

website: http://www.lankarani.org/eng/mes/016.html

that “it is necessary for every individual who has an access to him to kill him. The person in charge of the […] newspaper, who published such thoughts and beliefs consciously and knowingly, should be dealt with in the same manner.” Another cleric who lives in the city of Tabriz has reportedly offered his house as a reward for anyone who kills the two men.
The sentence was handed down despite protests from Azerbaijan’s embattled journalistic community, a number of non-governmental organizations and the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE).

What emerges from the trials, convictions and physical attacks over the years is an apparent pattern of coordinated assaults against freedom of speech in Azerbaijan. On 27 April, independent journalist Eynulla Fatullayev was convicted of “criminal libel” and “insult” and sentenced to 30 months in prison for allegations he purportedly made having to do with events surrounding the massacre of civilians in the Azerbaijani town of Khojaly during the 1992-1994 Nagorno-Karabakh war. Fatullayev’s original article evidently attached some blame for the tragedy to the failure of Azerbaijani military forces to protect the town. But in the furor that followed the article, Fatullayev was charged with libeling the residents of Khojaly.

Fatullayev, perhaps Azerbaijan’s best-known opposition journalist, denies having made libelous comments, but his conviction - and the physical attack on the same day against his colleague Uzeir Jafarov - reminds critics of the government of the price they may be forced to pay when they stray too far from what is acceptable, to both the government and the conservative Shi’ite establishment.

Journalism in Azerbaijan was a high-risk endeavor even before the 2005 murder of Elmar Huseynov, editor of the independent Monitor newspaper, and a friend of Fatullayev’s. It clearly remains a high-risk endeavor.

In October last year, well-known poet and opposition journalist Sakit Zahidov was convicted on charges of illegal possession and use of drugs. The charges were widely believed to be politically oriented, with the arrest coming only three days after Ali Akhmedov, the executive secretary of Azerbaijan's ruling New Azerbaijan Party, called for Zahidov’s arrest for his alleged “slanders” against government officials.

Zahidov’s brother Ganimat happens to be the chief editor of the opposition newspaper Azadlig, which has been a thorn in the side of the government for years and was ejected from its office space in 2006 along with the Turan News Agency and the Popular Front Party.

Last week, Rovshan Karbili - the editor of opposition newspaper Mukhalifat - and reporter Yashar Agazade were sentenced to two and a half years in prison (identical to Fatulayev’s sentence) for libel in connection with an article that accused Jalal Aliyev, an uncle of President Ilham Aliyev, of corruption.

OSCE Representative on Freedom of the Media Miklos Haraszti expressed “shock” over the sentence in a statement to the press.

"Azerbaijan's relentless persecution of journalists annihilates the security of journalism, a major OSCE commitment," said Haraszti.

The conviction and sentence came less than three weeks after a meeting between Haraszti and President Aliyev, during which the OSCE representative asked the president to halt the persecution of journalists, reminding Aliyev that "Azerbaijan today is the country in the OSCE region with the highest number of journalists in prison […]"

The US embassy in Baku issued a statement after the most recent convictions, saying that the imprisonment of seven journalists in toto in Azerbaijan "is part of a trend of pressure - including violence, threats and libel cases - that runs counter to Azerbaijan's stated commitment to media freedom. Journalists in democratic countries are not imprisoned for exercising freedom of expression. We urge the Azerbaijani government to remove libel from the criminal code and to take steps to create the necessary conditions for media freedom."
In 2005, Freedom House, a non-governmental organization that monitors democratic development, downgraded Azerbaijan from "partly free" to "not free."

Finally, on 21 May, authorities closed down the offices of Fatullayev’s newspaper Real Azerbaijan as well as another opposition paper, the Azerbaijan Daily, two of the most popular newspapers in the country. While the government says the closure was due to maintenance and fire safety issues, no other tenants in the building were evicted. And as of 23 May, Fatullayev faces additional charges of "making a terrorist threat," a development that could extend his prison term for many years.

The independent media are being all but shut down in Azerbaijan. The terrorism charges against Fatullayev and the stiff sentences handed out for a harmless editorial and criticism of a member of the president’s family send a message to the press that the confines for freedom of expression in Azerbaijan are becoming more circumscribed.

It is hard to imagine that the remaining opposition newspapers such as Azadlig will tone down their editorial coverage, although independent television network ANS is perceived by many to have done just that since it was allowed back on the air last year after a brief closure. The atmosphere in the country has certainly chilled in over the course of the past couple of weeks, and the government now will have to decide if it has communicated the new rules with sufficient clarity or whether more arrests are in the offing.

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Karl Rahder has taught US foreign policy and international history at colleges and universities in the US and Azerbaijan. In 2004, he was a Visiting Faculty Fellow in Azerbaijan with the Civic Education Project, an academic program funded by the Soros Foundations and the US Department of State. He is currently based in Chicago.
The views and opinions expressed herein are those of the author only, not the International Relations and Security Network (ISN).

URL: http://www.isn.ethz.ch/news/sw/details.cfm?ID=17659

May 24, 2007

His Excellency Ilham Aliyev
President
Republic of Azerbaijan
19 Istiglaliyat St.
370066 Baku
Azerbaijan

Your Excellency:

On behalf of the World Press Freedom Committee —an organization representing 45 press freedom groups from six continents— I wish to express my profound concern about the alarmingly high number of incarcerations of journalists in your country, including the recent ones of Rovshen Kebirli, editor of Mukhalifet, an opposition newspaper, and Yashar Agazade, a reporter of this publication.

Mr. Kebirli and Mr. Agazade were sentenced to two and a half years in prison on May 16 as a result of the criminal defamation proceedings against them stemming from the publication of an article very critical of Parliament member Jalal Aliyev, a close relative of yours.

The article, published on Feb. 27, accuses Jalal Aliyev of corruption and mismanagement of agriculture fields. He reacted by pressing criminal defamation charges against the two journalists for “insulting his dignity.”

The local Caucus Media Investigations Center has rightly condemned the sentences calling them “politically motivated,” an attack on freedom of expression, and a violation of the country’s Constitution and of international treaties of which Azerbaijan is a signatory.

Messrs. Kebirli and Agazade have joined seven other journalists in prison, making Azerbaijan one of the least press-freedom friendly countries in the world. The names of theses professionals are Rovshan Kebirli, Yashar Agazade, Eynula Fetullayev, Mirze Sakit (Zahidov), Samir Sedaqetoglu, Rafiq Tagý and Feremez Allahverdiyev.

International judicial entities such as the European Court of Human Rights and the Inter-American Court of Human Rights have ruled that criminal defamation laws, the ones used to imprison these journalists, are in direct violation of the fundamental right to free speech and to a free press, which are also consecrated in your country’s Constitution.

These institutions also have abundant jurisprudence that supports the concept that public officials should expect more, and not less, scrutiny and criticism from the rest of society. This acceptance of being a willing target of the media’s slings and arrows also implies public officials should restrain from using these laws in order to silence criticism directed at them.

The effective silencing of these journalists sends a disturbing message to all press freedom forces in your country and abroad. These journalism professionals are part of a critical component to Azerbaijan’s democracy. Without a free and independent media, government officials cannot be kept accountable and responsive to the rest of society. Without this essential ingredient, transparency and good governance become impossible to achieve.

The incarcerations of Messrs Kebirli and Agazade and the rest of their colleagues constitute a frontal attack on the very press freedom principles whose respect is essential for the functioning of a democratic society. Therefore, your Excellency, I urge you to use the full extent of the executive power’s influence to begin immediately the appropriate proceedings to free all of them.

Respectfully,
E. Markham Bench
Executive Director
World Press Freedom Committee