Azeri human rights activist Leyla Yunus experienced the full weight of government oppression in 2011 as a bulldozer rolled over her office in Baku and demolished it.
“They destroyed everything: the library, computers, my grandfather’s archives,” she told the Kyiv Post, saying that this followed her protests against the unlawful demolition of other properties in Baku.
Yunus said that in 2014 she and her husband had been jailed on trumped-up espionage charges and tortured. They were released under Western pressure in 2015 and emigrated to the Netherlands in 2016.
However, despite wholesale repression, torture and dozens of political prisoners, Azerbaijan enjoys good relations with Europe.
In other authoritarian countries, political murders, aggressive wars and other atrocities either go unnoticed or are dealt with through the expression of “concern” and perfunctory statements.
What are the reasons behind this policy?
First, Russia and other authoritarian regimes have powerful lobbyists in the West on their payroll who are seen as corrupting Western institutions.
Second, sanctions for aggressive wars and human rights violations are often unpopular with voters if they are seen as hurting the economies of Western countries.
Third, Western businesses have an interest in maintaining relations with authoritarian regimes. Oil and gas play an especially important role in this geopolitical game.
“A lot of countries have their own pragmatic interests, and they have exchanged European values for Russian gas and oil,” Ukrainian independent lawmaker Hanna Hopko told the Kyiv Post.
Ex-President of the Council of Europe Parliamentary Assembly Pedro Agramunt has been criticized for his cordial relations with the Azeri government. (AFP)
Lobbying for aggressors
The West’s reluctance to oppose Russia and other authoritarian regimes may be due to the fact that they have powerful lobbyists.
One of them, Gerhard Schroeder, enjoyed close relations with Russian dictator Vladimir Putin when he was the chancellor of Germany in 1998 to 2005. Since the end of his term, he has held top executive positions at Russian state gas giant Gazprom’s Nord Stream and Nord Stream 2 pipeline projects, Russian state oil company Rosneft and its subsidiary TNK-BP. Schroeder told the Blick magazine that he would be paid about $350,000 annually for the Rosneft job.
Schroeder has actively promoted the Nord Stream natural gas pipeline between Russia and Germany, which was launched in 2011 and has triggered a major controversy. In 2018 the construction of two extra lines of the pipeline called Nord Stream 2 began.
Due to Schroeder’s role in furthering Russia’s interests, the word “Schroederization” has been coined.
“Schroeder has become the symbol and personification of such lobbyism,” Ukrainian political analyst Volodymyr Fesenko told the Kyiv Post.
Former Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi is another influential promoter of Russia’s interests. He has long been a personal friend of Putin and accused the West in 2014 of “a ridiculously and irresponsibly sanctioning approach to the Russian Federation, which cannot but defend Ukrainian citizens of Russian origin that it considers brothers”.
Evidence has also been piling up that Russia has bribed Western sports officials. Investigative journalists have exposed alleged corruption related to the decisions by the International Federation of Association Football (FIFA) to award the 2018 and 2022 World Cups to Russia and Qatar. In 2015 nine high-ranking FIFA officials were indicted by the U. S. Department of Justice on racketeering, wire fraud and money laundering charges.
Britain’s Prime Minister Tony Blair (R) greets the Kazakhstan President Nursultan Nazarbayev in London, on Nov. 21, 2006. Blair has been criticized for his role as a well-paid adviser to Nazarbayev. (AFP)
Central Asian lobbyism
Meanwhile, some top Western officials have enjoyed close links to authoritarian Kazakh President Nursultan Nazarbayev, who has ruled his country with an iron fist since 1989.
Ex-British Prime Minister Tony Blair has been an advisor for the Kazakh government. According to e-mails leaked to The Daily Mail, Blair has received more than $29 million from Kazakh authorities.
Blair denies making any personal profit from his deals with Kazakhstan. His office told The Daily Mail he simply helped to set up an advisory group and had not personally advised Nazarbayev.
Human rights abuses and torture are routine in Kazakhstan despite the Kazakh government’s denials, according to the Human Rights Watch. In 2011 as many as 15 protesters were killed at an anti-government rally in the Kazakh city of Zhanaozen.
Azeri dictator Ilham Aliyev also has a powerful lobby in Europe.
In 2017 the Council of Europe started an investigation on suspicion that some members of its parliamentary assembly had been bribed by Azerbaijan.
As a result of the alleged bribes, the assembly failed to pass a resolution on political prisoners in Azerbaijan in 2013, Azeri human rights activist Yunus said.
Pedro Agramunt, chairman of the Council of Europe’s parliamentary assembly in 2016 to 2017, has been lambasted for his cordial relations with the Azeri government. He had to resign from his post due to the controversy.
Azeri human rights activists Leyla (L) and Arif Yunus (C) hug their daughter after their arrival at Schiphol Airport, The Netherlands, on April 19, 2016. They had to leave their country due to fabricated cases against them. (AFP)
In 2017 Agramunt was mentioned as benefiting from an Azeri money laundering scheme in the Azerbaijani Laundromat, an investigation by the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project, a Kyiv Post partner. He denies the accusations of wrongdoing.
Azerbaijan, a major oil and gas producer, has been ruled by the Aliyev family as its personal fiefdom — with just one interruption in the 1980s — since 1969, when Heydar Aliyev was the secretary of the country’s Communist Party in the Soviet period. He was the country’s president in 1993 to 2003 before being succeeded by his son, Ilham.
There are 161 political prisoners in Azerbaijan, according to the Azeri Center for the Protection of Political Prisoners. The Azeri government has denied the existence of political prisoners and abusing human rights.
Business interests
Pragmatic economic interests are seen as a major reason behind Western countries’ reluctance to react to human rights violations and aggressive wars.
“The main factor is business interests,” Fesenko said. “European businesses, especially Italian and German ones, are closely linked to Russia.”
He also said that Western countries do “raise human rights issues but, when it comes to pragmatic economic interests, they prefer such interests.”
Russia, the world’s second largest producer of both oil and natural gas, has leverage in Europe due to its natural resource exports.
Azeri President Ilham Aliyev has enjoyed good relations with the West despite his government’s brutal authoritarinism. (AFP)
Europe is also dependent on energy supplies from Azerbaijan.
“Europe has a pragmatic interest in maintaining energy security, which is threatened by Russia,” Azeri human rights activist Eldar Zeinalov told the Kyiv Post. “That’s why it has to cooperate with such controversial countries as Turkey, Azerbaijan and even (in the future) Turkmenistan. Therefore the West’s policy on human rights violations in such countries is ambiguous.”
Balázs Jarábik, a visiting scholar at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, told the Kyiv Post that the EU “needs to weigh what is more important: energy diversification from Russia or human rights in Azerbaijan.”
“It chooses not to choose,” he added. “It chooses to deal with both.”
Apart from business interests, tough measures against authoritarian countries are often unpopular with the electorate, Jarabik said.
“(For example), the Latvian prime minister has to explain to the Latvian people that sanctions are going to hurt them because of Ukraine,” he added. “You think it’s going make him popular?”
Former German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder has benefited from his lucrative jobs at Russian state companies and close links to the Kremlin. (AFP)
Flawed partnership
Russia had enjoyed relatively favorable relations with many Western governments until 2014, when the West imposed sanctions on the Kremlin for its annexation of Crimea and launch of an aggressive war against Ukraine. However, the sanctions were not sufficient to prevent Russia from continuing its aggression.
Russia was given a free hand to attack neighbors after Europe and the United States failed to penalize it for its aggression against Georgia in 2008.
“The West doesn’t have a Russia policy,” Jarabik said. “It doesn’t know what to do with the current situation. We do want to support Ukraine but we don’t know how… And Ukrainians are making it hard due to corruption, slow reforms and a lot of things that have not changed.”
Jarabik and Fesenko said that tougher sanctions against Russia could include kicking Russia out of the SWIFT financial transaction network and an oil embargo.
“These are two real sanctions that would really matter if the Western goal was to raise the cost for Russia,” Jarabik said. “But it’s very hard to advocate for more sanctions… The international community is not ready for such a radical step.”
Meanwhile, Azerbaijan doesn’t even face any sanctions for its repressive policies. Instead, Azerbaijan and the European Union have been discussing reaching a comprehensive cooperation agreement.
“It’s shameful to reach a comprehensive agreement with a dictator responsible for the kind of lawlessness that hasn’t been seen since the time of Stalin,” Yunus said.
Azeri opposition journalist and blogger Mehman Huseinov was jailed in 2017 on charges of slander for two years in what was widely believed to be a political case.
In December 2018 Azeri authorities brought new charges against Huseinov, threatening him with a new 7-year jail term for allegedly “resisting a representative of the authorities.” The new charges were later dropped under Western pressure.
“There was some reaction to Huseinov,” Yunus said. “But there’s no reaction to those who are less well-known. And there is no reaction to torture, murders and mass political repressions.”
Council of Europe spokeswoman Tatiana Bayeva told the Kyiv Post that the council had criticized human rights abuses in the country, including the Huseinov case.
Azeri riot policemen detain protestors in central Baku on January 26, 2013. The police has brutally dispersed an unauthorised rally, beating up and arresting scores of people. Several dozen protesters briefly gathered in Baku’s central Sahil square to protest against the police using excessive force against peaceful protests. (AFP)
Kazakhstan has found itself in a similar situation.
Zhanara Akhmet, a Kazakh journalist who lives in exile in Kyiv, argued that Iveta Grigule-Peterse, head of the European Union’s delegation in Central Asia, and EU representatives in Kazakhstan had paid little attention to human rights violations in the country.
“The EU’s delegation to Kazakhstan never criticizes human rights violations in Kazakhstan,” Akhmet told the Kyiv Post.
Zoltan Szalai, a spokesman for the delegation, responded that it is “doing its utmost within the framework of our diplomatic status to address the issue of the human rights situation in Kazakhstan.” He said that the delegation regularly raises the issue of human rights with Kazakh authorities.
In an effort to improve his international image, Nazarbayev invited British judges to lead a commercial court in his country in 2018.
However, Akhmet is skeptical about the development.
“This is an utter farce,” she said. “All issues are resolved as a result of telephone calls (from the Presidential Administration), and few of them get to courts.”
