Repression in Azerbaijan: “Aliyev’s regime feels emboldened” | EUROtoday

At the tip of November, the Azerbaijani home secret service pressured a neighbor to ring Ali Karimli’s doorbell. As quickly because the 60-year-old opposition politician opened the door, masked males stormed in, shouted and searched the condominium. This is what Sezen Karimli, the politician’s 27-year-old daughter, reported to the FAZ The raid lasted round six hours and the boys confiscated all of the telephones.

Meanwhile, in her British exile, the daughter didn’t discover out what was taking place at house in Baku together with her father, mom and twelve-year-old brother. Ali Karimli was then taken to a secret service detention middle. “He has been imprisoned ever since. His trial is on February 13th,” the daughter says on the telephone.

Karimli’s imprisonment is “the latest scandal in the ongoing consolidation of authoritarian practices in Azerbaijan,” criticized human rights activists at Amnesty International. They demanded in useless that the politician be launched. Karimli was international minister from 1992 till the coup by the daddy of the present ruler, Ilham Aliyev, the next yr. In the many years that adopted, Karimli was usually harassed. Despite a ruling by the European Court of Human Rights, the authorities didn’t give him a passport to journey overseas they usually more and more restricted his communication choices.

How Karimli is alleged to have ready an “armed seizure of power,” because the prosecution claims, stays unclear. A connection is being constructed with allegations in opposition to a former head of Aliyev’s presidential administration, who’s merely underneath home arrest. The allegations in opposition to her father have been fabricated, says Sezen Karimli. “Everyone in the country understands that a political decision has already been made.” Those in energy have been simply ready to see whether or not the persecution “will have consequences.” That’s why Karimli’s household and colleagues try to make the case identified.

It appears paradoxical: after the entire conquest of the Nagorno-Karabakh area in September 2023, Aliyev set course for peace with the enemy Armenia. At the identical time, his authoritarian regime intensified its crackdown on unpopular voices. Several members of the Popular Front social gathering, which Karimli leads, have been additionally arrested. Human rights activists now depend round 390 political prisoners. Among them are 25 journalists whose detention circumstances quantity to torture, in keeping with the group Reporters Without Borders.

One clarification for the supposedly paradoxical conduct is that, on the one hand, Aliyev’s regime, which runs oil and gas-rich Azerbaijan like a household enterprise, has misplaced a method of mobilizing the inhabitants in opposition to a typical enemy and distracting them from grievances and corruption with the tip of the Karabakh battle. On the opposite hand, Aliyev appears impressed by the truth that he’s now being courted greater than ever within the West. Since Russia’s assault on Ukraine in 2022, the European Union has wished to purchase increasingly uncooked supplies from Azerbaijan. And American President Donald Trump presents the battle within the South Caucasus as one of many wars that he ended.

Now Trump is sending his vice chairman to the area: According to the AP information company, J. D. Vance will journey to Yerevan after which on to Baku instantly after his go to to the opening of the Olympic Games in Italy. For Azerbaijan, will probably be solely the second official go to by a US Vice President after Dick Cheney’s in 2008. Trump requested Vance in January for this journey to “build on our peace efforts and advance the Trump route for international peace and prosperity.”

This connection, often called TRIPP, which was unveiled in August on the White House reception of Aliyev and Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan, is meant to run from Azerbaijan to the Nakhichevan exclave by southern Armenia. An American-controlled firm with Armenian participation is to take over all work there. This “TRIPP Development Company” has but to be based. But Baku is accelerating, has already began constructing high-voltage energy traces by itself territory and is providing itself to the USA and the EU as a improvement accomplice.

Meanwhile, Aliyev is shining on the worldwide stage, for instance when he and Pashinyan obtained a prize awarded by the rulers of the United Arab Emirates in Abu Dhabi on Wednesday for the initiated however not but signed peace settlement between their two international locations. “We were at war for 30 years,” Aliyev mentioned afterwards, “now we have lived in peace for six months,” which have been characterised by “partnership, cooperation” and the pursuit of peace. At the identical time, Aliyev takes revenge on his opponents and takes revenge.

On Thursday, a navy court docket in Baku sentenced 5 officers of Armenia’s unrecognized Nagorno-Karabakh Republic to life in jail, together with former de facto president Arajik Harutyunyan. Two different former heads of the entity every obtained 20 years in jail. Last yr, the Azerbaijani political scientist Bahruz Samadov, who had promoted peace and understanding with the Armenians, was sentenced to fifteen years in jail for “high treason”. Samadov is at present desperately attempting to forestall his being transferred to a infamous jail with a starvation strike, fearing that he’ll die there.

Sezen Karimli says her father was not mistreated in jail and is in good well being. But she fears Aliyev’s regime feels “emboldened” by worldwide favor. Like her father, she at present sees a historic alternative for her nation and Armenia to make peace and go away Russia’s “sphere of influence.” “But for that to really happen, human rights and fundamental freedoms are needed.” Anyone in search of an actual partnership with Baku should suppose past the present regime and handle the destiny of political prisoners, she says.

Her older brother is amongst those that are at present lobbying Congress in Washington to increase the Magnitsky Act, which offers for entry and account bans in opposition to human rights violators, to Aliyev’s individuals. “If those involved in these crimes can no longer freely travel to Western countries and invest their assets there, that would be super effective,” believes the prisoner’s daughter. “They would change their minds.”