THE CORLEONES OF THE CASPIAN
Foreign Policy
June 11, 2014 Wednesday
On Oct. 9, 2012, the American subsidiary of the State Oil
Company of the Azerbaijan Republic (SOCAR) purchased a five-story,
23,232-square-foot mansion in the heart of Washington, D.C., for the
purposes of “expand[ing] its operations in the United States,” as the
Washington Business Journal put it. Oil is the one thing Azerbaijan
has plenty of, and it’s the one thing the United States is most
interested in, so SOCAR’s “operations” are bound to be extensive.
Given the money at stake, the mansion’s sale price was a pittance:
$12 million. The exact address is 1319 18th St. NW, which ought to be
familiar to many an old Cold War hand as the former office of Jeane
Kirkpatrick, a onetime U.S. ambassador to the United Nations and one
of the most influential officials in Ronald Reagan’s administration.
This mansion is where Demokratizatsiya, the journal of post-Soviet
democratization, founded in 1992, used to be published. And, for a
time, its most famous lessee was Freedom House, the respected human
rights monitor, which today counts Azerbaijan among the “not free”
countries.
“I’m speechless,” said Jennifer Windsor, the executive director of
Freedom House when it was based at the Kirkpatrick address and now the
associate dean for programs and outreach at Georgetown University’s
School of Foreign Service. “I find it the highest form of irony that
one of the world’s least free countries is now occupying what was
the house of freedom.”
It’s as much a sign of the times as it is an irony. Barack Obama’s
administration has cut the U.S. budget for democracy promotion and has
struck all manner of cynical bargains with kleptocratic authoritarian
regimes. Realpolitik and isolationism are trading at high premiums
again, as whole swaths of Congress, beholden to a libertarian or Tea
Party ideology, view human rights as, at best, an afterthought of the
national interest or, at worst, as an inconvenience that America can
ill afford in the 21st century.
But SOCAR USA’s tony new address also underscores the quiet success
of one of the most energetic and free-spending foreign lobbies
in American and European politics — that of the regime headed by
Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev. Over the past decade, a South
Caucasian country the size of Ireland but with possibly twice the oil
reserves of Texas has managed to win friends and influence people
who include 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.
Where it hasn’t resorted to all-expenses-paid vacations to Azerbaijan’s
capital, Baku — a form of what one European think tank witheringly
describes as “caviar diplomacy” — it has poured millions of dollars
into top-drawer U.S. lobbying, consultancy, and PR firms to whitewash
its image in the American media.
But it’s a bit more subtle than that: The Aliyev regime has quietly
made inroads into transatlantic establishments by recapitulating a
hat trick of persuasive arguments.
The first is that Azerbaijan is the only secular Muslim-majority
state that is an ally of the United States and NATO in the war on
terror as well as a happy commercial and diplomatic ally of Israel,
which imports around a third of its energy from the Caucasian state.
Azerbaijani infrastructure is set to help facilitate NATO and U.S.
troop withdrawal from Afghanistan later this year.
The second is that its oil boom, which caused Azerbaijan’s GDP to
grow tenfold from 2001 to 2011, is a necessary counterweight for
diversifying Europe’s energy consumption and putting an end to Russia’s
monopolistic and bullying tactics, the nadir of which were its “gas
wars” with Ukraine and Belarus. Almost all of Azerbaijan’s exports
in 2011 were in oil and petroleum products. The so-called Southern
Gas Corridor, a pipeline rival to Russia’s Nord Stream, advanced
dramatically last December when a BP-led consortium began laying the
groundwork for Shah Deniz 2, a $28 billion natural gas exploration
project in the Azerbaijani-controlled part of the Caspian Sea. British
Foreign Secretary William Hague and EU Energy Commissioner Gunther
Oettinger were both in Baku for the signing of this landmark deal,
which will ship gas through two pipelines: the Trans Anatolian Natural
Gas Pipeline, running through Turkey, and the Trans Adriatic Pipeline,
running through Greece and Italy. Even though Azerbaijani gas going to
the European Union represents just 2 percent of the 500 billion cubic
meters per year that the continent imports, Europe wants to lower its
energy dependence on Russia. Moscow’s state-owned gas giant, Gazprom,
is now under antitrust investigation by the European Commission. And
the continuing Western standoff with the Kremlin over Russia’s invasion
and destabilization of Ukraine will mean that Azerbaijani gas becomes
more important to Brussels in the coming months and years.
Finally, situated at the gateway between Asia and Europe, Azerbaijan
is a strategic partner for the West in resisting Iran’s nuclear
threat as well as Russian President Vladimir Putin’s attempts to
“re-Sovietize the region,” as then U.S. Secretary of State Hillary
Clinton memorably characterized the Russian-conceived customs union,
entry into which has sparked a political crisis in Ukraine. So as
the United States goes looking for as many friends as it can find in
the post-Soviet world — especially those with energy resources —
Baku’s influence in Washington is only poised to grow.
And if the West is ever ungrateful or unreceptive to these overtures,
the Azerbaijani lobby passive-aggressively intimates, then the Aliyev
regime always has the option of turning toward Moscow or Tehran,
both of which are eagerly knocking at its door.
The immediate aim of this three-tiered charm offensive is to “Johnny
Mercerize” an otherwise ugly domestic political reality, as one veteran
Azerbaijan specialist, who spoke to Foreign Policy on the condition
of anonymity, termed it. That is, accentuate the positive and ignore,
downplay, or just plain lie about the negative. But there’s another
encoded agenda. “The Aliyev lobby’s true purpose is to send a message
back home that there is nothing that can be done to remove this family
from power,” said Elmar Chakhtakhtinski, chair of Azerbaijani-Americans
for Democracy (AZAD), an opposition-linked diaspora group. “When
a U.S. congressman or former congressman congratulates Aliyev on
victory, it doesn’t necessarily give the regime any better position
in the West, but to the regime’s own domestic population, it sends
a powerful signal that even the West is behind it, that the world
outside of Azerbaijan isn’t that much different.” The demoralizing
effect such signaling can have on embattled dissidents or civil
society groups in Azerbaijan is profound.
A grim human rights record
Indeed, belying the lobby’s in-plain-sight efforts to portray
Azerbaijan as a democracy that shares America’s values is an incredibly
grim human rights situation, about which the U.S.
government — a prominent target of Aliyev’s overtures — is under no
illusions, or at least isn’t anymore. In 2010, Clinton, then the U.S.
secretary of state, claimed that Azerbaijan had made “tremendous
progress in democracy development.” But contrast that to what the U.S.
ambassador in Baku, Richard Morningstar, told Radio Azadliq, the
Azerbaijani service of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty (RFE/RL),
on May 16 of this year: “I think we are in a situation where we talk
past each other on democracy issues.” That’s putting it mildly.
The State Department’s human rights report for Azerbaijan found in 2013
that there were “[i]ncreased restrictions on freedoms of expression,
assembly, and association, including intimidation, arrest, and use
of force against journalists and human rights and democracy activists
online and offline” and “[u]nfair administration of justice, including
increased reports of arbitrary arrest and detention, politically
motivated imprisonment, lack of due process, executive influence
over the judiciary, and lengthy pretrial detention for individuals
perceived as a threat by government officials, while crimes against
such individuals or their family members went unpunished.”
Take just a few examples. In January 2013, police beat and tear-gassed
peaceful protesters in the city of Ismayilli. Two people who weren’t
there on that day, but only arrived afterward, were also arrested:
Tofiq Yaqublu, the deputy chairman of the Musavat Party and a reporter
for Yeni Musavat newspaper, and Ilgar Mammadov, the head of Republican
Alternative, an anti-Aliyev civic movement. Mammadov was also denied
admittance into the 2013 presidential race on the grounds that
many of the required signatures were invalid; he has called Aliyev
an illegitimate leader who ought to resign. In March 2014, he was
sentenced to seven years in prison; Yaqublu was sentenced to five
years. On May 22, the European Court of Human Rights stated in a news
release that it found that Mammadov “had been arrested and detained
without any evidence to reasonably suspect him of having committed
the offence with which he was charged” and that the “actual purpose
of his detention had been to silence or punish” him for criticizing
the government.
In March and April 2013, authorities used water cannons and rubber
bullets against a demonstration in Baku. They then arrested seven
members of NIDA (“Shout”), a youth activist group, initially charging
them with drugs and explosives possession and then accusing them,
along with another activist from the Free Youth movement, of plotting
mass disorder — a common rap used against demonstrators in Putin’s
Russia too. In May 2014, eight Azerbaijani activists, seven of them
the NIDA members, were given lengthy prison sentences, ranging from
six to eight years.
According to Rebecca Vincent, a former U.S. diplomat and a human
rights activist,
Aliyev has instituted a “climate of fear” in a country that has seen
its number of political prisoners jump from 65 in January 2013 to
“nearly 100 cases.”
Aliyev has instituted a “climate of fear” in a country that has
seen its number of political prisoners jump from 65 in January 2013
to “nearly 100 cases.” The Institute for Peace and Democracy, an
Azerbaijani project funded by the National Endowment for Democracy and
run by Leyla Yunus (who is herself now being criminally investigated by
the Aliyev government), puts the figure at 130. Much of the crackdown
coincided with the October 2013 presidential election, the results
of which were declared an Aliyev landslide — an entire day before
any voting took place. Following the election, the Azerbaijani regime
presided over what Amnesty International’s program director for Europe
and Central Asia termed a “ruthless and relentless attack on any
dissenting voices in the media.” If anything, Aliyev has regressed
in his repressive methods. “Normally President Aliyev signs pardon
decrees to mark the new year, as well as the Novruz holiday, which
sometimes include cases of political prisoners. However, this year,
he did not sign decrees on either occasion,” Vincent said.
Instead, he locked up more people. One of them, Anar Mammadli,
is the chair of the Baku-based Election Monitoring and Democracy
Studies Center (EMDS), a respected independent monitor partly funded
by the National Endowment for Democracy and the National Democratic
Institute. EMDS had documented “serious violations” at 91 percent of
the 769 polling stations monitored during the October election.
Mammadli was arrested in mid-December and charged not only with tax
evasion and illegal business activity, but also with trying to rig
the election himself, an allegation Vincent calls “absurd.”
In March 2014, the Baku headquarters of the oppositional Azerbaijan
Popular Front Party was blown up. Firefighters on the scene
attributed the explosion to a faulty gas tank in the building’s
basement, home to a barber shop. The barber, however, insists that
no such tanks were in his establishment. The building’s Turkey-based
owner, meanwhile, claimed that he had received threats against his
family from a government official, and he even posted one recorded
conversation online. The Popular Front blames the Aliyev regime for
the headquarters blast and points out that several of its activists
had been arrested around the same time on charges of “resisting
police orders.” Among them was 18-year-old Tofig Dadashov, who was
held in the Binagadi Police Department for 48 hours without food or
water. On March 5, Amnesty posted a notice on its website stating,
“authorities in Azerbaijan have been using every trick in the book
to stop members of the opposition.”
What remains of an adversarial or free media is also on the ropes. The
oldest opposition newspaper, Azadliq, is nearing bankruptcy after a
spate of civil damages claims and the State Publishing House’s demand
that it pay all its outstanding debts at once. Another such outlet,
Yeni Musavat, suspended publication in early November 2013 because
of state restrictions on the release of its sales proceeds. In May,
Parviz Hashimli, a reporter for the independent newspaper Bizim Yol
and the editor of the online site Moderator, was sentenced to eight
years in prison on charges that he prompted another man to smuggle
weapons from Iran into Azerbaijan. Hashimli says that not only did
he not know the alleged weapons trafficker (and now his accuser)
but that he was denied a lawyer for 20 days following his arrest
and kept from talking to anyone else. Both publications with which
Hashimli is affiliated are known for their muckraking journalism on
corruption and human rights abuses.
It is something of a national pastime in Azerbaijan that critics of
the Aliyev regime or documenters of the country’s enormous state graft
end up being accused of crimes themselves, and locked away in prisons.
Keeping up with the Aliyevs
Ilham Aliyev first attained power in 2003 when he succeeded his father,
Heydar, the Soviet-era satrap of Moscow who had ruled Azerbaijan
since 1969, making the elder Aliyev both a Soviet and post-Soviet
dictator. His son now presides over one of the world’s longest-running
dynastic dictatorships and is paterfamilias of a family that WikiLeaked
U.S. Embassy cables variously refer to as a medieval feudal fiefdom
or Sonny Corleone of The Godfather.
It’s also hopelessly corrupt, according to a number of published
reports. Despite the president’s official salary of $228,000 per
year, his children all own millions of dollars in property. As the
Washington Post uncovered in 2010, when Heydar Aliyev (Ilham’s son,
who was named for the boy’s grandfather) was just 11 years old, he
bought $44 million in luxury mansions on the man-made Palm Jumeirah
archipelago in Dubai. Heydar’s two sisters, Leyla and Arzu, both now in
their 20s, also own extravagant digs in the United Arab Emirates, with
the three children possessing a collective real estate portfolio worth
$75 million. Moreover, as I discovered several months ago, the younger
Heydar, now well into his teenage years, is technically the legal
owner of 48.99 percent of the Azerbaijani subsidiary of Vneshtorgbank
(VTB), one of Russia’s largest state-owned banks, with branches in
two dozen countries and more than $712 million in French and German
pensioner deposits. (VTB was the subject of an in-depth corruption
study by Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny and his Foundation
for Fighting Corruption, the final report of which I edited.)
All three of the Aliyev brood were also found to be owners of a
lucrative Azerbaijani telecom company called Azerfon, whose more
colloquial moniker, Nar Mobile, is thought by the State Department to
be named not just for the Azeri word for “pomegranate” but also for
first lady Mehriban Aliyeva’s sister, Nargiz. When RFE/RL reporter
Khadija Ismayilova broke the story that Azerfon was likely controlled
by the Aliyevs, the state targeted her for harassment by bugging her
apartment, threatening her with nasty messages (“whore, behave, or
you will be defamed”) and publishing compromising photographs of her
in newspapers associated with the ruling New Azerbaijan Party. The
government has claimed to be investigating what was obviously the
professional intimidation of a journalist.
“Nothing happened,” Ismayilova said in an interview several months
ago. “I sued the prosecutor’s office for not investigating and for
violating my rights and now the case is with the European Court of
Human Rights.” But if Baku is investigating claims of intimidation,
they have a funny way of doing it. On February 18, the Serious
Crimes Investigation Department of the Prosecutor General’s Office in
Baku accused Ismayilova of divulging state secrets and summoned her
for questioning. She had posted a document to her Facebook account
allegedly showing how Aliyev’s security service, the MNB, tried to
recruit an Azerbaijani opposition activist as an informant. Pro-Aliyev
media have branded her an American spy, an accusation both she and the
U.S. Embassy in Baku ridiculed. Although she has not been formally
charged with any crime, Ismayilova has been prohibited from leaving
Baku without the consent of the authorities. In February 2014,
she posted an appeal to her followers and defenders on Facebook,
telling them not to keep quiet if she wound up in jail: “If/when I get
arrested, I want you to make sure that your audience understand the
reasons. Anti-corruption investigations are the reason of my arrest.
The government is not comfortable with what I am doing. I am about to
finish three investigations. I will make sure to finish them before
anything happens. If not, my editors and colleagues will finish and
publish [them].”
Then on March 12, Ismayilova was “summoned” again by Azerbaijan’s
general prosecutor — this time for two days in a row — for
questioning regarding meetings she had with two U.S. congressional
staffers in Baku in January. “Who are these dogs that you would discuss
with them Azerbaijan’s education system?” Ismayilova reported she
was asked. She remains unbowed: It was Ismayilova who conducted the
May interview with Ambassador Morningstar in which he said that the
United States and Azerbaijan are “talking past each other” on human
rights. That interview has already caused the diplomat a great deal
of trouble with his host government: Ramiz Mehdiyev, the head of the
Azerbaijani Presidential Administration, said Morningstar violated
the Vienna Convention on Diplomatic Relations and that his comments
constituted “a gross interference in the internal affairs of the
country.”
Azerbaijan ought to be extremely fertile soil for the conduct of
investigative journalism — which may account for why the Aliyev regime
wants to ensure that it never is. In 2013, Transparency International’s
Corruption Perceptions Index rated Azerbaijan 127 out of 177 countries
— on equal footing with Russia. And, as the World Bank concluded in
2011, “Corruption in Azerbaijan is an integral part of the governance
regime, a multi-player prisoner’s dilemma where no single player
can make a unilateral move because they owe their position to the
President’s inner circle, and breaking the trust of this group would
be severely punished.” Rebecca Vincent, the human rights campaigner,
said that this undermines the lobby’s outreach to foreign businesses:
“Something that foreign investors should definitely be aware of is
the lack of rule of law in the country. If you had to take something
to a national court, you couldn’t have a reasonable expectation to
receive due process and a fair trial.”
And 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. And as with any country
evocative of The Godfather, this is mainly a family business.
Three families control or oversee most of the overseas lobbying
apparatus: the Aliyevs, including the first lady’s own family, the
Pashayevs; the Mammadovs, headed by Transport Minister Ziya Mammadov,
whose son, Anar, runs the U.S. arm; and the Heydarovs, headed by
Emergency Situations Minister Kamaladdin Heydarov, whose ministry
functions sort of like FEMA on amphetamines, retaining control over
the fire departments, state grain reserves, construction licensing,
and possibly even an anti-aircraft battery near Baku. Heydarov’s
son Tale runs the European lobby arm. “Whatever business we are
investigating, it turns out that it’s linked to one of these three
families,” Khadija Ismayilova said.
The American lobby
The 1938 Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA) forces any companies
based in the United States to report on money they have received from
foreign governments.
A perusal of the Justice Department’s FARA filings on Azerbaijan
reveals a welter of law firms, consultancies, and prestigious lobby
firms all on the Aliyev payroll.
A perusal of the Justice Department’s FARA filings on Azerbaijan
reveals a welter of law firms, consultancies, and prestigious lobby
firms all on the Aliyev payroll. “The success of the Azeri lobby
really lies [in] the amount of money it pours into the effort,” said
Chakhtakhtinski of Azerbaijani-Americans for Democracy. “And it pays
top dollar.”
So it does. The Podesta Group, a D.C.-based lobbying and public
relations outfit founded by Tony Podesta, brother of John Podesta,
the current special advisor to the Obama administration, has been
the registered agent of the Azerbaijani Embassy for several years. On
January 1, 2014, the group inked a new agreement to receive $50,000 a
month from the embassy, plus expenses to provide “strategic counsel to
Azerbaijan on strengthening its ties to the United States government
and institutions.” This agreement, which was signed by Elin Suleymanov,
the Azerbaijani ambassador to the United States, and Anthony Podesta,
the head of the Podesta Group, was amended on April 15, 2014,
to encompass “additional services” defined as performing “public
relations services for Azerbaijan.” It is good through July 14, 2014.
Foreign Policy contacted the Podesta Group for comment about the
nature of its contract with the embassy. We were referred to the
FARA filings. We also asked if the firm had any reservations about
lobbying on behalf of a foreign government seen by Human Rights Watch,
Amnesty International, and other international monitors as becoming
worse, not better, in its respect for human rights norms. We were
informed that someone from the “Azerbaijan desk” would respond to
our inquiry. No one ever did.
DCI Group, LLC, another public-affairs firm with offices in Washington,
Brussels, and Houston, also worked for the Azerbaijani Embassy in
D.C., at least until Feb. 22, 2013, when its contract was terminated
for unspecified reasons. According to DCI Group’s website, it “helps
corporations navigate their most challenging political, legislative and
regulatory problems anywhere in the world” by “re-framing the issue,
and defining it on more favorable terms.” Its work for the embassy
focused on media outreach promoting the country’s satellite launch,
gas boom, bilateral relations, and SOCAR’s expansion. DCI Group also
organized a dinner on Oct. 22, 2012, at the ambassador’s residence,
related to “Azerbaijan economic development and investment in [the]
U.S. economy and Azerbaijan support of [the] U.S. war on terror.” Among
the guests were the former deputy U.S.
ambassador to the United Nations, Ken Adelman (who served under Jeane
Kirkpatrick, in fact); James K. Glassman, the founding executive
director of the George W. Bush Institute; Sheri Annis, a media
consultant married to Fox News’s Howard Kurtz; and George Friedman,
the CEO of private intelligence corporation Stratfor.
FP reached Craig Stevens, spokesman for DCI Group, by phone. The
termination of the contract with the embassy, he said, was simply
because “the terms had been completed. We had a good relationship
[with the embassy] and we certainly support the ambassador.” Asked if
DCI Group was ever concerned by Azerbaijan’s poor human rights record
or its recent erosion of journalistic and political freedoms, Stevens
replied: “Yeah, I wouldn’t get into that.” DCI Group is not, according
to Stevens, “actively seeking” to work with the embassy again.
Roberti+White LLC, a “bipartisan federal government affairs and
public relations” firm based in Washington and New York, received
$20,834 per month for six months — $125,000 in total — from SOCAR
USA in exchange for offering “strategic counsel” to the state oil
company to “strengthen its ties to the United States government
and institutions.” According to the consulting agreement signed
in mid-July 2013, or just in time for SOCAR USA’s purchase of the
Kirkpatrick building, Roberti+White was responsible for building
the company’s website, manning its Twitter and Facebook accounts,
and even creating an internship program in Washington. The contract
expired on Dec. 31, 2013. FP reached Roberti+White for comment but
was told that the company does not talk to the press.
Elsewhere, lobbying firms have taken U.S. politicians to Azerbaijan.
In late May 2013, Oklahoma Rep. Jim Bridenstine traveled from Tulsa
to Baku under the auspices of the Houston-based Turquoise Council of
Americans and Eurasians (TCAE), a 501(c)(3) organization, which is
apparently close to the Turkish Islamist cleric in exile Fethullah
Gulen. According to Bridenstine’s Post-Travel Disclosure Form filed
with the House Committee on Ethics, he described TCAE as being
“committed to establishing and advancing long-term relationships
and close cooperation between the U.S. and Azerbaijan,” “[t]o
introduc[ing] and provid[ing] exposure to Azerbaijan’s military,
regional, energy security and economic issues,” and “[t]o promot[ing]
mutual understanding through conversation.” (FP contacted Rep.
Bridenstine’s office seeking comment but was told the congressman
was too busy with legislative matters to be interviewed in time for
publication.)
On its website, TCAE claims to “make a bridge to the Turkic world”
focusing on Turkey, Azerbaijan, and all of the post-Soviet Central
Asian republics, but it’s also been linked to a number of charter
schools founded in the United States by the Pennsylvania-based Gulen,
now said to be the main antagonist of scandal-plagued Turkish Prime
Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan. Bridenstine was in Baku to attend a
conference called “USA-Azerbaijan: Vision for the Future,” a lavish
affair sponsored by SOCAR, BP, ConocoPhillips and other energy
majors, and opened by Ilham Aliyev. This multinational junket,
complete with tours of a glittering new Caspian capital seen by
many as a cross between Dubai and Paris, barred reporters from Radio
Free Europe/Radio Liberty, the one news outlet that has done the most
digging on the Aliyev families’ questionable business dealings. But it
earned write-ups by Politico, the Washington Post, and the Washington
Diplomat (the only publication to attend) because of its recognizable
guests and speakers. Among these were delegates from 42 states, 75
state representatives, 11 active congress members, and three newly
retired Obama administration staffers: ex-Press Secretary Robert Gibbs,
former Deputy Chief of Staff Jim Messina, and campaign strategist
David Plouffe, all of whom received five-figure checks for addressing
the conference, according to organizer and TCAE president Kemal Oksuz.
Also in attendance was Michael McMahon, the former Democratic
representative from New York, who served on the House Foreign Relations
Committee and the Azerbaijan Caucus. After Aliyev’s re-election
in October, McMahon told the New York Times that the vote was
“honest, fair and really efficient. There were much shorter lines
than in America, and no hanging chads.” He also wrote a few op-eds
praising Azerbaijan as a “partner to the U.S. and a stalwart in the
region.” (McMahon now co-chairs the lobbying division for Herrick,
Feinstein LLP, a New York-based law firm that opened its first
international office in Istanbul in the fall of 2013.)
No pro-Aliyev entity is more active in Washington — at least
judging from its FARA disclosures — than the Azerbaijan American
Alliance (AAA). Its current chairman is Dan Burton, former Republican
congressman from Indiana and the former chair of the House Subcommittee
on Europe, Eurasia, and Emerging Threats who announced upon his
appointment on Feb. 13, 2013: “The friendship between our two countries
is very important and I shall work hard to make it even stronger.” A
photograph of President Aliyev is featured on the AAA’s website as
a clickable graphic that directs users to its “leadership” section.
The AAA aims to “develop an alliance of individuals and organizations
in the United States and Azerbaijan,” to “[a]dvance understanding,
respect, friendship, cooperation and mutual support” between
the two countries, and to “[e]ducate policy makers and leaders of
industry about critical and complex issues related to the symbiotic
relationship.” And that relationship evidently needs a lot of
insider help.
The Justice Department’s FARA website also discloses that AAA
paid Fabiani & Company $2.4 million for “planning and executing
strategies to encourage research and advocacy about the Azeri people,
country, culture and international relations.” Fabiani & Company
is a D.C.-based “government affairs and strategy consulting firm”
founded by James Fabiani, a former director of the House Committee on
Appropriations. In October 2013, it hosted the AAA’s second annual gala
dinner in Washington, which the organization described as featuring
“nearly 600 invited guests from Capitol Hill, the Diplomatic Corps,
think tanks, academic and business communities.” In the six months
prior to May 31, 2013, Fabiani & Company received over $800,000 from
the AAA and incurred expenses in excess of $664,000, including for
advertising in the Washington Post and Express newspapers.
In fact, AAA and Fabiani & Company share the same address at 1101
Pennsylvania Ave. When FP called AAA, it reached the government affairs
firm for a second time. A representative explained that AAA was indeed
run out of Fabiani & Company’s offices and that the same person would
get back to us on behalf of both organizations. Follow-up attempts
to reach both AAA and Fabiani & Company were unsuccessful.
Cited in a lengthy section of the AAA’s FARA filing titled “Influential
Individuals Who Have Met With the Azerbaijan America Alliance” are
85 House members; 21 senators; employees of the Heritage Foundation,
Jamestown Foundation, and Atlantic Council; business leaders from
the Thomas Reuters Foundation, Raytheon International, Boeing, and
Northrop Grumman; and reporters from the New York Times, Washington
Post, and Foreign Policy.
Impressively, the AAA has even encouraged seven state legislatures to
pass resolutions or proclamations announcing their friendship with
Azerbaijan, often using language that would raise eyebrows among
human rights monitors or opposition figures.
The Oklahoma State Senate referred to Azerbaijan as a “democratic,
secular and constitutional republic.”
The Oklahoma State Senate referred to Azerbaijan as a “democratic,
secular and constitutional republic.” The Illinois State Senate claimed
that Azerbaijan had “equal rights for all citizens, regardless of race,
ethnicity, gender, or religious affiliation” and “shares American
values,” the latter phrase also being taken up by Kentucky’s House
of Representatives. Mississippi’s House resolution, dated Feb.
28, 2012, made special mention of the “noteworthy importance in
supporting the continued relationship between Azerbaijan and Israel”
and that “roughly a third of the crude oil supplied to Israel” comes
from Azerbaijan.
The Mammadov mystery
The Azerbaijan America Alliance was founded a little over two years
ago by a man named Anar Mammadov, who, according to FARA documents,
has personally met with House Speaker John Boehner, former Speaker
Nancy Pelosi, 13 other congress members, and 7 senators. Mammadov is
described on AAA’s website as “an independent Azerbaijani businessman
and entrepreneur,” which is certainly one way of putting it.
The scion of Ziya Mammadov, the state’s transport minister, Anar
Mammadov has amassed a reputation as an international playboy.
Allegedly worth $1 billion, and based mainly in Baku, he sued two
dissident newspapers in Azerbaijan for reporting that he once drunkenly
ordered a restaurant — one owned by Kamaladdin Heydarov, the minister
of emergency situations minister, no less — to serve him up a shish
kebab made of bear meat. The alleged price for this off-menu cuisine
was $1.2 million, and Heydarov was said to have personally intervened
with a reluctant wait staff to let the well-connected oligarch munch on
this rarefied game. (Mammadov was also rumored to have propositioned
Rihanna when the Grammy award-winning pop star traveled to Baku in
October 2012 — against the objections of human rights groups —
to perform for the FIFA Under-17 Women’s World Cup, which was held
in the capital.)
But the Azeri’s portfolio doesn’t exactly bespeak an “independent”
string of accomplishments, whatever the Azerbaijan American Alliance
claims. Mammadov is president of Garant Holding, a company formerly
known as ZQAN Holding. (Garant gets a special mention on the AAA
website’s bio of Mammadov.) That company’s profit margins, as a number
of media outlets have reported, appear inextricably linked to a number
of sweetheart contracts signed with his father’s Transport Ministry.
According to a detailed expose by RFE/RL and the Organized Crime
and Corruption Reporting Project, Mammadov and his uncle Elton are
partners with another family (also named Mammadov but not related) that
founded an Azeri entity that is heavily invested in “transportation,
construction, sports complexes, and oil exploration.”
That firm, known as the Baghlan Group, “has received preferential
treatment and the interlinked companies owned by the families have
taken large shares or even monopolized certain transportation sectors
like bus transport, taxis, road construction, and cargo-transportation
services” in Azerbaijan, writes journalist Nushabe Fatullayeva. “In
the Azeri language,” she observed, “the word ‘baghlan’ can mean
‘closed’ or it can mean ‘connected.’ In the case of Baghlan Group,
both seem to apply.”
The Baghlan Group’s subsidiaries have also been granted “lucrative,
apparently noncompetitive contracts to import and operate taxis and
buses, and to build roads.” All of these contracts were certified
by the ministry run by Ziya Mammadov. And no minor dispensation has
that been: Baghlan has earned an estimated $1.3 billion in highway
construction contracts alone. In fact, the Baghlan Group’s registered
address is the same address as Azerbaijan State Railway LLC, a
department of the Transport Ministry.
The clearest case of Anar Mammadov’s profiting from this connection
appears to have been with the Baghlan Group’s taxi and bus companies,
both the largest in their respective industries. The bus company has
“hundreds of buses,” Fatullayeva wrote, quoting the Baghlan website,
that are responsible for transporting 20 percent of Baku’s passengers.
In the lead-up to the Eurovision Song Contest 2012 hosted in Baku,
Baghlan Group’s cab company, Baki Taxsi, imported 1,000 London-style
black cabs into Azerbaijan for $28,000 apiece. There is no evidence
that other cab companies were given a chance to bid for the service
of shuttling thousands of international tourists around the capital
city, Fatullayeva reported. And following the Eurovision contest,
Baki Taxsi edged out any and all competition, preventing other cabs
from parking in the city center or near subway terminals.
The bank that processed all of Baki Taxsi’s credit card transactions is
the Bank of Azerbaijan, a financial institution that has “monopolized
almost all taxi business,” according to Fatullayeva. It was also
listed as one of the many holdings of the Baghlan Group on the latter’s
website. (FP attempted to contact Anar Mammadov at the Baghlan Group
by phone and email. There was no voicemail set up for the company’s
line and no one ever responded to our email request for an interview.)
According to Fatullayeva’s report, Anar Mammadov previously owned an 81
percent stake in that bank until he divested in January 2013 — well
after Baki Taxsi’s Eurovision windfall. Furthermore, a subsidiary of
ZQAN Holding company was given the privilege of insuring all of Baki
Taxis’ London cab passengers. At present, Mammadov’s cousin Ruslan is
a member of the bank’s supervisory board, of which a senior manager
of ZQAN Holding is also the chairman. ZQAN Holding also took part
in the construction of the Baku International Bus Station, which is
owned by Mammadov’s uncle Elton. The Baghlan Group, ZQAN Holding,
and the Bank of Azerbaijan all sponsor the Baku Football Club, the
honorary president of which is Mammadov.
One of the Baghlan Group’s “major clients” is SOCAR.
How SOCAR does business
Last December, the London-based anti-corruption watchdog Global
Witness released a detailed report titled “Azerbaijan Anonymous.” It
investigated SOCAR’s business dealings that were in some way linked to
a 35-year-old man named Anar Aliyev, who, over a five-year period, made
around $375 million from them in transactions. It is unknown whether
or not this Aliyev is related to the president’s family (Aliyev is a
common surname in Azerbaijan) but it bears noting that he was born in
Nakhchivan, an autonomous enclave of Azerbaijan that has produced most
of the country’s elite, including the current president of SOCAR, its
executive director, President Aliyev, and his late father. Yet despite
having almost no public profile as an Azeri oligarch or industrialist,
Anar Aliyev managed to hold “ownership stakes in at least 48 deals with
[SOCAR], including production sharing agreements and joint ventures.”
In one case Global Witness examined, SOCAR created an oil trading
company in 2007 called Socar Trading SA, which had $33.66 billion
in revenue in 2011. However, legally SOCAR only owned 50 percent of
this entity; the ultimate beneficial owners of the other 50 percent
were Anar Aliyev and Valery Golovushkin, Socar Trading SA’s CEO as
well as the former vice president of Lukoil, Russia’s second-largest
oil company. Both men used a series of offshore shell companies
controlled by parent companies that they owned. Aliyev’s initial
investment was $5 million; Golovushkin’s was $1.25 million. Then, in
August 2012, SOCAR bought out both parent companies for $103 million
and $30 million, respectively — a 2,360 percent return on Aliyev’s
initial investment and a 2,700 percent return on Golovushkin’s. The
fact that 50 percent equity in such a lucrative trading company was
awarded to “obscure offshore entities with opaque ownership can only
raise concerns about the motivation,” Global Witness found.
Nor did SOCAR, in responding to the report’s findings, ever account
for why such an inscrutable oilman as Anar Aliyev was hand-selected
to make such a fortune. SOCAR mainly evaded Global Witness’s direct
questions altogether and even claimed, against evidence, that “no
dividends were paid from the project” to Aliyev or Golovushkin. The
widespread — but unproven — suspicion among Azeri journalists I’ve
spoken to is that Anar Aliyev was a front for a well-connected member
of the regime, if not several.
Moreover, while SOCAR Trading SA became fully state-owned when
Aliyev and Golovushkin cashed out, a new, partially privately owned
middleman, SOCAR International DMCC, still appears to be taking a cut
of the profits. In June 2011, SOCAR established SOCAR International
DMCC in Dubai but, again, saw fit to own only 50 percent of that
company. Between June 2011 and December 2012, SOCAR International
DMCC made $66 million in profit from buying oil from SOCAR and then
selling it to SOCAR’s now wholly owned subsidiary, SOCAR Trading
SA. Why the need for another middleman, and who is the ultimate
beneficiary owner of SOCAR International DMCC? The state oil company
declined to answer that question when it was posed by Global Witness,
although it did accuse the NGO of betraying “envy [of] the increasing
influence of SOCAR.”
Following Global Witness’s report, and after what the NGO told FP
had been three months of unsuccessful attempts to contact him for
comment, Anar Aliyev decided to go public. He gave an interview to
the Azerbaijani publication Business Time, which he said he valued
as a “purely objective business journal.” He also stated that he had
“recently” changed his surname to Alizade, owing in part to questions
his former surname raised about his possible filial connections to
Baku’s ruling family. Aliyev/Alizade emphasized that he had “no family
relations with any powerful representatives of the Nakhchivani clan”
or anyone else in the Azerbaijani government. He got his start in
business, he told Business Time, by importing Turkish textiles, then
trading land and private property in Baku, then trading construction
materials and equipment. “Socar Trading SA was set up as a result
of the offer came from me [sic] and well-known oil trader Mr Valery
Golovushkin,” Aliyev/Alizade insisted. As for the reason he didn’t
respond to the NGO’s interview requests prior to the report’s
publication, he claimed that he “was very busy this year and had an
extensive business trips schedule, and no letters or requests from
Global Witness were brought to my attention.”
Aliyev/Alizade’s interlocutor at Business Time, chief editor Mammad
Hajiyev, was clearly satisfied with these answers and impressed with
his subject. In an editorial comment at the bottom of his article,
Hajiyev wrote: “Despite his young age our interlocutor positively
impressed us by his self-confidence, experience, accuracy and
patience.”
Global Witness seems less taken with this self-accounting. “There
are still unanswered questions regarding how and why [Aliyev/Alizade]
or his companies were selected to occupy this key role dealing with
Azeri oil,” Tom Mayne, a researcher at the NGO, told FP. “We are still
waiting for a full response from SOCAR on these and other matters.”
The European lobby
In addition to being a high-stakes property owner in the Gulf,
first daughter Leyla Aliyeva is also fashion and art junkie — and
a journalist. She’s editor-in-chief of the “style magazine” Baku,
a publication financed by her father and published by Conde Nast
Contract Publishing in London. Something of an Azeri Kim Kardashian,
Aliyeva of course needs good PR people to help maintain her jet-set
lifestyle. Enter Matthew Freud, the son-in-law of Rupert Murdoch
and head of the London-based PR firm Freud Communications. Having
reportedly rejected contracts from Libyan strongman Muammar al-Qaddafi
10 times, and from ousted Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak five times,
Freud was clearly more amenable to a request for representation by
the Azeri dauphine. In 2011, he organized what the British satirical
weekly Private Eye called “a caviar-rich London party” to “launch”
Aliyeva in British high society. Guests at this soiree included Lord
Peter Mandelson, Tony Blair’s onetime political svengali; Freud’s wife
and Murdoch’s daughter Elisabeth; Lord Browne, the former head of BP;
Ed Vaizey, the current British culture minister; Stuart Rose, formerly
the top man at Marks & Spencer; and Evgeny Lebedev, the Russian
oligarch proprietor of the Independent and Evening Standard newspapers.
But glossy journals, PR firms, and caviar-laden parties in England
are the least of the Aliyevs’ outreach in Europe. “The Azerbaijan
lobbying effort in Europe is headed by Tale Heydarov, son of the
extremely wealthy emergency situations minister and a graduate of
the London School of Economics,” Oliver Bullough, a London-based
expert on the Caucasus and the author of The Last Man in Russia:
The Struggle to Save a Dying Nation, told FP. “Tale is urbane and
educated, hangs out with Prince Harry, and puts a lot of money into
trying to improve Azerbaijan’s image. He wants to promote it as a
reliable energy partner, a country to do business with.”
Tale Heydarov’s main vehicle for this effort is the European Azerbaijan
Society (TEAS), headquartered at Queen Anne’s Gate in the Mayfair
district of London, with additional offices in Istanbul, Paris,
Berlin, and Brussels. A 2010 U.S. State Department cable published by
WikiLeaks described the group as follows: “The ‘society’ purports to be
an independent advocacy group, but its talking points very much reflect
the goals and objectives of the [government of Azerbaijan]. In recent
meetings, Tale and his cohorts have raised ‘Armenian aggression’
in Nagorno-Karabakh and ‘double standards’ of U.S. human rights
and democracy reporting in the region, and complained about efforts
of the U.S. Congress to provide humanitarian assistance within the
Nagorno-Karabakh enclave.”
Here, too, PR professionals are not far behind. TEAS’s current
director is Lionel Zetter, a fellow of the Charted Institute of Public
Relations (CIPR) and of the Royal Society of Arts, as well the author
of Lobbying: The Art of Political Persuasion. In an email to FP,
Zetter denied that TEAS had any kind of allegiance to the regime
in Baku. “The mission of TEAS is to promote the country (not the
government) of Azerbaijan and to foster links with Western Europe,”
he wrote. “It is not our place to interfere in or comment on the
internal politics of any country.” Asked if he considers Azerbaijan a
democracy, Zetter answered: “Azerbaijan holds regular elections for
the Presidency, for the Milli Majlis and for municipal authorities,
so of course it should be classified as a democracy. If you know of a
perfect democracy anywhere in the world please do point it out to me.”
For TEAS, fostering links with Western Europe seems to involve
regularly flying out members of national legislatures or the European
Parliament for luxurious romps around Azerbaijan. Perhaps not
surprisingly, these officials often return home with fond things
to say about their hosts. The Guardian found, for instance, that
TEAS had spent “at least £71,740” ($118,177) in sending Tory MPs
to Azerbaijan and “at least £9,700” ($15,978) in sending Labour
MPs. Sometimes politicians don’t even have to travel to be graced
with TEAS’s largesse. In September 2013, for instance, the society
held jazz festivals on the margins of all of Britain’s three major
political party conferences: Conservative, Labour, and Liberal
Democrat. TEAS has also founded Conservative Friends of Azerbaijan,
a London-based advocacy organization that classifies Azerbaijan as a
“democratic country” and currently has 25 British MPs as members. It
also sponsored an event put on by Progress, a New Labour “pressure
group” seen as supportive of Tony Blair’s political legacy.
On TEAS’s advisory board sits Lord Kilclooney, a baron from Northern
Ireland, who, according to his parliamentary disclosure of interests,
is remunerated for his services. FP managed to reach Lord Kilclooney
by phone. He said that this paid arrangement with the organization
ended “some years ago” and that he has not sat in on any TEAS board
meeting in “several years.” Contrary to what the State Department
minuted in its cable, Kilclooney saw no pro-Aliyev bias in TEAS’s
activities. “I find it totally open and very promotive of Azerbaijan
generally, not the government. The Americans make a lot of mistakes;
I wouldn’t pay attention to what they say,” he explained.
Lord Kilclooney told FP that he had personally met Tale Heydarov, who
chairs the TEAS board meetings, and was “very impressed.” He thought
the same of President Aliyev, whom he also met: “I was very impressed
there as well.” And while he noted that freedom of expression in the
media is “not the best,” and that Azerbaijan “has a long way to go to
become a fully free democratic country,” Lord Kilclooney believes that
it is “moving in the right direction.” Asked about the recent spate
of arrests of journalists and dissidents, he told FP that Turkey has
done far worse and that the United States executes more people per year
than Azerbaijan. “I’m horrified at the way the United States supports
Armenia, as does Russia, against the interests of Azerbaijan,” he said.
TEAS also paid £6,000 a year ($10,000) to Mark Field, a Conservative
MP who happens to sit on the House of Commons committee that oversees
Britain’s intelligence and security services. Field was also formerly
the chairman of the All-Party Parliamentary Group on Azerbaijan,
a body designed to “maintain good relations between the legislatures
and governments of the UK and Azerbaijan,” as its website states.
According to the TEAS website, the organization first took Field
to Baku in July 2010, on a joint invitation by TEAS and the NATO
International School of Azerbaijan, an NGO founded in 2007 as a
“research, education and training center on Euro-Atlantic security and
integration and [to] further promote Euro-Atlantic values and ideas
in academia and in a wider audience in the region at large.” And it
was clearly money well spent. In a subsequent interview with TEAS
conducted from his Portcullis office, Field praised Azerbaijan as a
“great trading partner” with healthy oil and gas reserves that are of
great importance to British companies such as BP. His impressions of
the place? Field said he was struck by the sense of “vibrancy” and
“optimism” in the country — all related to its burgeoning business
sector, of course. He further described Azerbaijan as a “model state”
that tolerates religious freedom and has a handle on extremism. Not
a word was said about Azeri human rights.
FP tried unsuccessfully to contact Field by phone and at his
parliamentary email. Zetter, however, confirmed that Field did earn
£6,000 a year for approximately one and a half years — “which he
duly declared to the Parliamentary authorities. He no longer has any
paid or formal position with TEAS.”
The ability of TEAS to recruit pro-Aliyev politicians in Europe is
made more disconcerting by the fact that Tale Heydarov’s father is
quite well known to the U.S. government. Previously the chairman of
the State Customs Committee, which the State Department called “one
of the most corrupt operations in Azerbaijan,” Kamaladdin Heydarov
“gain[ed] massive wealth, as significant illicit payments were paid
‘up the food chain’ in an elaborate and well-orchestrated system of
payoff and patronage.” The Heydarov clan, considered by Foggy Bottom
to be the second-most-powerful family in Azerbaijan, owns everything
from fruit juice companies to real estate.
Nowhere have TEAS’s attentions been better rewarded than at the Council
of Europe, the Strasbourg-based supranational institution sometimes
known as Europe’s oldest human rights monitor. Founded in 1949, it
predates the European Union and today consists of 47 member states,
encompassing more than 800 million citizens. There are three statutory
bodies to the council: the Committee of Ministers, made up of all the
foreign ministers of the member states; the Parliamentary Assembly
of the Council of Europe (PACE), which consists of parliamentarians
from the member states; and the Secretariat, which is headed by a
secretary-general. All member states are meant to be democracies, and
while the resolutions passed by the Council of Europe are nonbinding,
they are still seen as highly symbolic — capable of conferring a
clean bill of health on a member state’s civil liberties and human
rights record, or capable of demonstrating where that member state
has fallen short.
Azerbaijan’s admittance in 2001 to this purportedly exclusive club
of democracies was itself the spadework of a contentious lobbying
campaign. But since the Baku-Tblisi-Ceyhan pipeline was laid down in
2005, making Azerbaijan a fattened oil titan, the Council of Europe
has increasingly become a vehicle for whitewashing Azerbaijan’s
international reputation, argues Gerald Knaus, the chairman of the
European Stability Initiative (ESI), an independent Berlin-based think
tank that has made a series of comprehensives studies of Azerbaijan’s
influence in the Council of Europe. “We have a failure of two types,”
Knaus told FP. “The failure of the parliamentarians is actually worse
because they’ve done harm — by lending an alibi and giving an excuse
to Azerbaijan. But the committee of ministers has also failed. When I
go around and ask ministers from friendly countries, ‘Why is no one
raising their voice about Azerbaijani human rights?’ they all say
it’s energy interests, oil pipelines, and such. ‘Human rights just
don’t matter for us.'”
No greater proof of this proposition is needed than the fact that on
May 14, Azerbaijan ascended to the chairmanship of the Committee of
Ministers — the very same week in which the government sentenced
eight Azeri activists to lengthy jail terms. In fact, two other
political prisoners of the Aliyev regime are affiliated with the
Council of Europe itself. Ilgar Mammadov, who received a seven-year
sentence in March, ran the Council of Europe’s Political Studies
Programme in Baku. Anar Mammadli, for whom the government has just
requested a nine-year prison term, had advised the PACE rapporteur on
political prisoners. Human Rights Watch’s South Caucasus researcher,
Giorgi Gogia, was appalled. “The Council of Europe is the region’s
foremost human rights body, but Azerbaijan’s chairmanship comes at a
time when the government is blatantly flouting the organization’s core
standards,” Gogia said in a statement published on the NGO’s website.
Baku has a very clear motive in orchestrating such perverse political
theater, Knaus argues. “It’s to show any opponents of the regime that
‘we cannot be shamed. On the contrary, we are embarrassing you, and
you have to accept it. Even the democratic guardians of Europe have
given up on you.'”
The Azerbaijani president is clearly using the Council of Europe to
congratulate himself and shield his regime from outside criticism.
“[T]here are no political prisoners in Azerbaijan,” he pronounced
in January at a joint press conference in Brussels with NATO
Secretary-General Anders Fogh Rasmussen. Bear in mind that Azerbaijan’s
accession to the Council of Europe was partly predicated on its
agreement to release all political prisoners in the country.
However, the most critical resolution on the status of such prisoners
in Azerbaijan ever drafted was defeated in January 2013 in what
happened to be the best-attended vote in the history of PACE. And
here Aliyev really does deserve congratulating, since this robust
attendance appears to be the work of his lobbying efforts to mobilize
the “no” votes.
According to Knaus, the co-optation of PACE has been relatively
straightforward and easy. All Azerbaijan has had to do is get
sympathetic MPs from other member states to turn up whenever a vote
on the country is held. “Usually people in PACE don’t turn up for
votes,” Knaus said. “And the people who come whenever Azerbaijan is
being voted on are already in favor of the government’s line. Then
they become the majority.”
As a result, Baku has an excellent track record in watering down
resolutions about its human rights abuses, assigning the sensitive role
of rapporteur for Azerbaijan’s human rights monitoring committee to
Aliyev loyalists, blocking attempts to suspend Azeri delegates’ voting
rights, and dispatching delegations to give fraudulent Azeri elections
the stamp of approval. It’s this last trick in particular that has
been so embarrassing to PACE that it has led to a major confrontation
with Europe’s most respected and deferred-to election monitor.
You call that a clean vote?
The Office of the Democratic Institutions and Human Rights (ODIHR)
of the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe — which
famously shined a spotlight on the cooked polls in Georgia in 2003
and Ukraine 2004, leading to those countries’ “color revolutions”
— was the only organization to send both long- and short-term teams
of monitors to cover Azerbaijan’s parliamentary election in November
2010. It documented countless cases of fraud.
Some ballots cast, ODIHR found, exceeded the number of voter signatures
at polling stations. Votes were also registered in some districts
a full day before the election. In one prison, 1,000 inmates were
handed filled-out ballots in closed envelopes and told to file them;
one inmate demurred and was beaten by guards. A third of the 150
stations observed by ODIHR were listed as “bad” or “very bad.” One
official from the office claimed that he’d never seen so many instances
of ballot stuffing.
“By the end of the day,” ESI found in its widely discussed report
Caviar Diplomacy: How Azerbaijan Silenced the Council of Europe, “it
was clear that these had probably been the most fraudulent elections
ever monitored in a Council of Europe member state.” A similar act
of sanitization of Aliyev’s vote-rigging occurred during the October
2013 presidential election, which ESI also helpfully exposed in a
follow-up publication. Disgraced: Azerbaijan and the End of Election
Monitoring as We Know It states that that election “may have been
the worst vote count ever observed by an ODIHR election observation
mission anywhere.” As discussed, before the election was even held,
an Azerbaijani smartphone app run by the Central Election Commission
released the results, with Aliyev taking 72.76 percent of the vote. In
the event, the “official” results gave him 84.55 percent.
But that didn’t stop Aliyev’s most vociferous apologists in Europe
from giving his “victory” the all-clear. The head of PACE’s election
monitoring delegation, Robert Walter, a Conservative MP from Britain,
gave a joint press conference with Pino Arlacchi, the Italian head
of the European Parliament’s delegation, at the Hyatt Regency Hotel
in Baku. “[F]ree, fair and transparent” was their verdict.
Following this certification, it was found that six of the nine
MEPs who observed the election had committed a “manifest violation
of the code of conduct” for European Parliament, according to a
five-member advisory committee that monitors compliance with that
code. The news service European Voice reported that “[m]ost of the
trips had been organised and sponsored by Azerbaijan’s parliament
and by two organisations that refused to reveal the source of their
funding, the Society for the Promotion of German-Azerbaijani Relations
(GEFDAB) in Berlin and the European Academy for Elections Observation
(EAEO), registered in Belgium.” However, the president of the European
Parliament, Martin Schulz, decided to take no disciplinary action
against the six MEPs.
Walter, meanwhile, is the chair of the European Democrat Group (EDG)
in PACE, a voting bloc that includes the British Conservatives,
Putin’s United Russia, Aliyev’s New Azerbaijan Party, Turkey’s ruling
Justice and Development Party, and Ukraine’s Party of Regions, the
party of ousted Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych. In 2011, Walter
co-led a British trade mission to Baku sponsored by the Middle East
Association, self-described as the “UK’s leading business forum for
promoting trade and investment with the Middle East and North Africa.”
That mission, according to the association, had the “full support”
of the British Embassy in Baku, the Azerbaijani Embassy in London,
and TEAS.
Other allies of Azerbaijan have now gotten into trouble. Take Leonid
Slutsky, a deputy from the chauvinistic Liberal Democratic Party of
Russia and a member of PACE since 2004. Aliyev awarded Slutsky the
“Order of Friendship” in 2009, and the camaraderie has been repaid.
“Slutsky speaks at every debate in PACE on Azerbaijan,” Knaus says.
He’s also the current chairman of the State Duma Committee on the
Commonwealth of Independent States, Eurasian Integration and Links
with Compatriots. It was in this capacity that Slutsky found himself
sanctioned by the U.S. government after Crimea’s Duma-certified
“referendum” last March.
Another noted apologist is Mike Hancock, a Liberal Democrat MP from
Portsmouth, England, who declared in a PACE debate in 2011 that he was
“proud” to have been in Azerbaijan during the 2010 contest and that
the “best you can say about any election in any country … is that
one the day following the election, the majority of people have the
result that the majority want” — a proposition sometimes difficult
to test in Western democracies, let alone in dictatorial petro-states.
Hancock resembles Karl Marx as dressed by Savile Row, and his
famous tastes have cost him political credibility back home. He was
forced to stand down from the Liberal Democrats in June 2013 owing
to allegations that he had sexually assaulted a mentally handicapped
constituent. Before that, in 2011, the married Hancock became embroiled
in scandal because of his love affair with Ekaterina Zatuliveter, a
20-something parliamentary aide whom British intelligence identified
as a Russian spy, although a security court later exonerated her of
the charge. It had raised MI5’s concerns that Zatuliveter met with
a Russian spook based at the Russian Embassy in London, and that
Hancock was at the time a member of the House of Commons Defence
Committee. (She also had affairs with a senior German NATO official
and a Dutch diplomat, according to Britain’s Telegraph.) However,
Zatuliveter had other foreign interests, as well. She was formerly
paid £3,000 (nearly $5,000) for services rendered to none other than
TEAS. TEAS director Zetter told FP that Zatuliveter was compensated
in 2009 “for her work in helping to organize events highlighting the
plight of Azerbaijan’s 875,000 refugees and IDPs.”
An unnamed Azeri source explained to ESI how the quid pro quo
arrangement for cultivating PACE MPs works. This, too, is remarkably
straightforward. “One kilogram of caviar,” the source said, “is worth
between 1,300 and 1,400 euro. Each of our friends in PACE receives
at every session, four times a year, at least 0.4 to 0.6 kg.”
From: Baghdasarian