EurasiaNet.org
Aug 28 2014
Together A Lifetime, Azeri Activists Now Apart And In Jail
August 28, 2014 – 1:26pm, by Daisy Sindelar
Leyla and Arif Yunus met as young history students in the late 1970s,
at a party hosted by one of their professors at Baku State University.
As the evening drew to a close, Arif offered to walk Leyla to the
subway station. There was something about her he liked — a lot. A
week later, he appeared at her mother’s doorstep, asking for Leyla’s
hand in marriage.
Dinara Yunusova, the couple’s daughter, says her grandmother was
startled by the abrupt proposal. “Usually in Azerbaijan, it’s the
elders who will come and ask for the hand of the daughter. But my dad
came by himself,” says Yunusova, 28. “My grandmother was shocked, but
she said, ‘It’s her life.’ My mother had already noticed him a few
times at the university, even before the party, so I guess she liked
him, too.”
The couple was married soon afterward, at a small ceremony attended by
close friends. Nine years later, Dinara was born.
Arif became a respected author and historian; Leyla, a prominent
rights activist and outspoken government critic. Both shared a
passionate conviction of the need for reconciliation between
Azerbaijan and neighboring Armenia.
As a child, Dinara fell asleep to the sound of her parents talking
late into the night, sparring cheerfully over history or discussing
Leyla’s work as head of the Institute for Peace and Democracy, a group
launched in 1995 to fight corruption, violence against women, and
unlawful evictions.
Sometimes they would settle on the sofa to watch the Soviet-era World
War II movies they loved, or listen to tapes of Vladimir Vysotsky and
Bulat Okudzhava. “They both like to sing, even though they can’t,”
Dinara says. The two were rarely apart.
HRW: ‘Completely Bogus’ Charges
Now, however, the couple is experiencing the first real separation of
their 36-year marriage — as prisoners facing charges of fraud and
treason that supporters say are punishment for their long years of
activism and Baku-Yerevan peace efforts.
Leyla, 58, and Arif, 59, were arrested on July 30 and accused of
spying for the Armenian secret services and using foreign aid money to
recruit Azerbaijani citizens for espionage. Human Rights Watch has
dismissed the charges as “completely bogus.”
Leyla Yunus was remanded at the Baku Detention Facility the same day;
Arif Yunus was placed under house arrest but subsequently jailed at
Baku’s Kurdakhani Prison on August 5. Two days later, he was
transferred to the detention facility run by Azerbaijan’s National
Security Ministry, which is notorious for torture and other rights
abuses.
Their arrests come amid a sweeping opposition crackdown by the oil-fed
regime of President Ilham Aliyev; at least two other activists, lawyer
Intigam Aliyev and democracy campaigner Rasul Cafarov (aka Jafarov),
have been detained in recent weeks. A third, Ilgar Nasibov, was
brutally beaten and left for dead in the country’s Naxcivan exclave on
August 21.
The Yunuses, Cafarov, and Intigam Aliyev have all been added to a
newly published list — compiled, ironically, by Leyla Yunus and
Cafarov themselves — of nearly 100 political prisoners being held in
Azerbaijan.
Ilham Aliyev, whose government currently presides over the committee
of ministers of the Council of Europe, has denied the presence of any
political prisoners in Azerbaijan. Critics say the West has turned a
blind eye to the rampant rights abuses of the Aliyev regime out of
deference to the country’s massive energy wealth.
Will They See Each Other Again?
Concern is mounting, meanwhile, about the Yunuses’ state of health.
Leyla Yunus suffers from diabetes and requires a special diet; Arif
Yunus has a heart condition and was hospitalized after being denied
medical treatment when the couple was detained earlier this year at
the Baku airport and barred from leaving the country.
For Dinara, who has spent the last five years living in the
Netherlands, where she’s received political asylum, the news of her
parents’ arrests has been a torment. She says she last spoke to her
father just hours before he was taken into detention on August 5.
“He was very nervous. There were some problems with his heart and
blood pressure, but he tried to tell me everything was fine,” she
says. “He said he was going to bed and that he would call me the next
day. The next day, I saw in the newspapers that he had been taken in.”
Lawyers for the couple say they’ve been denied proper medical care and
have been barred from communicating with each other. In a plaintive
open letter to her husband published last week, Leyla Yunus describes
the harsh conditions of her detention cell and pressure from violent
cellmates but adds, “most difficult of all is that you are not
nearby.”
She goes on to compare them to Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn and other Soviet
dissidents who were arrested together with their wives. “Together we
have read it all…we often discussed how spouses who had been
arrested together felt.”
Dinara says the letter was heartbreaking to read, especially knowing
that her parents will spend months in jail — and possibly years, if
convicted. “She’s never been away from him,” she says. “Even when I
would Skype with my dad, she was always in the background calling him,
‘Arif, Arif, come here, help me with something.’ She couldn’t do
anything without him, she couldn’t be without him. And now, with his
health, she’s afraid that she’s never going to see him again. She
won’t be there to say goodbye.”
Growing up, Dinara says she was aware of the pressures facing her
mother. “My mom and dad, they never told me what to think. But I
listened to them talk, and when I got older, I started to translate
things for some of her cases. That’s when I really saw what kind of
complications there could be for her.”
But she says even as her parents pushed her to leave the country, they
refused to leave Azerbaijan themselves. “They said, ‘We’re in this,
and we’re staying here and working for human rights.'” Through it all,
they maintained a happy family life, with seaside vacations, walks
with their poodle, Joy, and even occasional tango lessons.
“If I could talk to them, I would tell them I love them a lot, and
that I’m proud of them,” Dinara says. “I hope to hug them very soon.
I’m very blessed to have such wonderful parents. Life could not have
sent me a better family.”
http://www.eurasianet.org/node/69741