EUROPEAN ARMENIAN FEDERATION
For Justice and Democracy
Avenue de la Renaissance 10
Bruxelles, 1000
Belgique
Tel./Fax : +32 (0) 2 732 70 26 / 27
E-mail : [email protected]
Web:
Open letter to José Manuel Barroso, President of the European Commission
Open Letter to Mr. José Manuel Barroso
President, European Commission
Rue de la Loi 200
1049 Brussels
Brussels, 12 June 2014
Dear President Barroso,
On June 14 you will be visiting Azerbaijan, where you
will be meeting President Ilham Aliyev to hold bilateral talks, and you
will be giving a speech at the ADA University on “EU – Azerbaijan: new
opportunities and challenges”.
The European Armenian Federation for Justice and
Democracy would like to once again draw your attention on Azerbaijan, a
country which the Freedom House categorizes as a ” Consolidated
Authoritarian Regime”, with Ilham Aliyev, the President of Azerbaijan,
being the first ever Organized Crime and Corruption Person of the Year
bestowed by the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project
(), who “succeeded his
father in 2003, continuing and intensifying the most repressive aspects
of his father’s rule. Since then, the inflow of significant oil
revenues has fueled presidential patronage, strengthened the
state’s security apparatus, and partially subdued both domestic
and foreign criticism of the regime”
().
It was only yesterday, that the Foreign Policy
magazine run an investigative piece titled “The Corleones of the
Caspian. How Azerbaijan’s dictator woos the United States and Europe”
(), stressing that while the
national debate is controlled at home through means of intimidation,
censorship, and legal jury-rigging, Azerbaijan’s greater mission is to
whitewash its reputation abroad – where it hasn’t resorted to
all-expenses-paid vacations to Baku – a form of what European Stability
Initiative witheringly describes as “caviar diplomacy” (“Caviar
Diplomacy. How Azerbaijan silenced the Council of Europe”,
, doesn’t leave much to
the imagination) – it has spent millions of dollars in U.S. and European
lobbying, consultancy, and PR firms to whitewash its image in the
American and European media. The Aliyev regime thus, have managed to
buy friends and influence people, including past and present members of
the U.S. Congress, British Parliament, and the Parliamentary Assembly of
the Council of Europe, which was once known for pressuring
dictatorships, not embracing them.
It was less than a month ago, that the Bureau of PACE
(Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe) decided that no more
Assembly committee meetings will be held in Azerbaijan for two years, as
of 1 June 2014
().
We urge you to address those issues at your meetings
and stress the anti-Armenian propaganda going on in Azerbaijan as well,
which reached its height in September 2012, when Ilham Aliyev pardoned
Ramil Safarov upon his arrival to Baku from Hungary, where he was
convicted for murdering an Armenian colleague during a course sponsored
by NATO’s Partnership for Peace Program in Budapest; whereas
Safarov had pleaded guilty and had expressed no remorse, defending his
action on the grounds that the victim was Armenian
().
Furthermore, the European Armenian Federation asks you
to stress that Azerbaijan respect the OSCE Minsk Group mediation efforts
in solving the Nagorno Karabakh conflict, withdraw the snipers along the
line of contact, and accept the creation of a mechanism of investigation
of incidents, which Armenia has already agreed to.
At your speech at the ADA, we ask you to address all
the above mentioned issues to the youth and the students, that it needs
more than an oppressing regime to develop and democratize a country, and
that for a lasting peace in the region, there should be confidence
building measures between the peoples, mutual understanding, tolerance
and acceptance.
The 2% Azerbaijani gas flowing to Europe should not
blind the EU Commission, should not make it accomplice to violations of
the core EU values and rights, in the hope of signing a Strategic
Modernization Partnership and an Association Agreement with Baku and the
Aliyev regime, whose victims are the Azerbaijani people and the region.
Yours faithfully,
Kaspar Karampetian,
President,
European Armenian Federation for Justice & Democracy