The sound of music
Europe’s song contest has not brought change to Azerbaijan. What could?
May 26th 2012 | BAKU | from the print edition
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All yours, babushki
WHEN Azerbaijan won the Eurovision song contest last year, local
campaigners hoped that hosting the contest this year would shine a
fierce spotlight on the country’s human-rights record. They have been
disappointed. Many protesters inspired a year ago by the Arab spring
are still in jail, independent journalists continue to be locked up
and political murders remain unsolved. Families have been forcibly
evicted with inadequate compensation to make room for new construction
projects, including the Crystal Hall, the futuristic, LED-coated arena
where Eurovision is taking place.
The European Broadcasting Union (EBU), which owns Eurovision, has come
under fire for treating the Azerbaijani government with kid gloves.
Though it held a workshop on media freedom earlier this month with
several of the country’s human-rights groups, it has shied away from
criticising the evictions and stayed silent on a demonstration in
Baku, the capital, this week that was violently broken up. The EBU
insists that Eurovision is `apolitical’, even though countries such as
Azerbaijan, desperate for international approval, clearly use it for
political aims.
As an association of broadcasters from 56 countries, the EBU is
hamstrung. Frank-Dieter Freiling, chairman of the contest’s board of
governors, is disappointed that there has not been more criticism of
the regime, but says governments should have used the opportunity to
apply more pressure themselves. That seems unlikely to happen on any
great scale: Europe sees Azerbaijan as a small but important
contributor to reducing its dependence on Russian gas. And although
Azerbaijan’s relations with Iran and Turkey, two traditional allies,
have been souring – Iran recalled its ambassador this week – it is a
strategic access point to Afghanistan for America, and to Iran for
Israel.
By contrast, the foreign press has covered human rights extensively in
the run-up to Eurovision. EBU officials privately wonder why places
such as Russia and Turkey, with their own human-rights abuses, did not
enjoy the same scrutiny when it was their turn to be host. Yet given
the modest impact of the coverage so far, once the 1,500 international
journalists in Baku have packed up and gone home any effect is
unlikely to last.
Optimists can see seeds of longer-term change. True, the economy
remains overwhelmingly dominated by energy. Oil and gas revenues have
allowed the government to boost defence spending, stoking fears of
renewed conflict with neighbouring Armenia. By 2017 the export
capacity of the huge Shah Deniz gas field is expected to more than
double. However, oil production, a far larger share of revenue, is
falling. The squeeze on the budget will eventually force the
government to think about diversifying the economy, says Sabit
Bagirov, head of the Entrepeneurship Development Foundation, a
think-tank. There is one promising sign, he adds: an e-government
programme designed to reduce people’s contact with officials is having
an effect on rampant low-level corruption.
Opposition parties, led by an ageing and exhausted generation, have
shrunk to nothing more than `dissident clubs’, says Hikmet
Hadjy-Zadeh, a prominent member of one of them. But a new generation
of internet-aware campaigners is becoming bolder. One of them, Mr
Hadjy-Zadeh’s son, Adnan, spent a year in jail for `hooliganism’ when
some thugs beat him up shortly after he had made a satirical video. At
the time he was working as a spokesman for BP, the developer of the
Shah Deniz field and the regime’s most faithful prop. After an
international outcry, the younger Hadjy-Zadeh got his job back once he
had emerged from jail.
Khadija Ismailova, an investigative journalist who has published
stories about the private wealth of the clan of Ilham Aliev,
Azerbaijan’s president, was smeared by a secretly filmed sex video
that was posted online. In her case, too, international indignation
helped. The support emboldened her, she says, and the internet makes
her work easier.
It will take years, however, for the new generation of dissidents to
gather meaningful force. For now Mr Aliev’s regime, which is already
working on a bid for the 2020 Olympics, can assume that its opponents
offer no threat.
http://www.economist.com/node/21555973