In his op-ed entitled “Armenia and Azerbaijan: Arriving at a fair and honest discourse,” Emil Agazade, while touching on issues only peripheral to my original article and best suited to his interests, passes all limits of journalistic ethics and crosses into the boundary of hate and ignorance.
Instead of attempting to give Congress a counter-lesson on history and geopolitics, I would highly suggest that Emil Agazade first help put his own house in order. Transparency International consistently ranks Azerbaijan among the most corrupt countries of the world, and its president Ilham Aliyev was recently named the “world’s most corrupt leader” by the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project. Journalists in the country continue to suffer from violence and threats, and pro-democracy activists have been beaten and imprisoned in recent years. The European Parliament has explicitly condemned Azerbaijan for “increasing number of incidents of harassment, attacks and violence against civil society and social network activists and journalists in Azerbaijan.”
This is also the very leadership of a country that makes heroes out of axe-murderers such as Ramil Safarov, who was recently pardoned despite having killed his fellow Armenian attendee with an axe in a NATO-sponsored study program in Hungary. This is also the same regime that embarked on a Taliban-style cultural genocide in 2005 against thousands of medieval Armenian religious monuments in Jugha, Nackichevan, which has been well-documented by video footage, photographs and advanced satellite imaging. International diplomats have been repeatedly banned by Azerbaijani authorities from visiting the region, including past and present U.S. Ambassadors to Azerbaijan, Matthew Bryza and Richard Morningstar.While the petro-dollars of the Aliyev regime fund lobbyists such as Emil Agazade to monitor the global media and attempt to suppress freedom of information, it would be much wiser for Azerbaijan’s leadership to spend the money at home, where over 40 percent of the rural population live below the poverty line.
Semerdjian is a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Oxford.
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