Tony Blair told by Azerbaijan victims: ‘Give your £90,000 speaker’s
fee to charity’
Tony Blair is under pressure to give to charity a fee of at least
£90,000 he was paid for making a speech in Azerbaijan, which is
notorious for its human rights abuses.
By Nick Meo in Baku and Robert Mendick
Daily Telegraph/UK
Published: 8:00AM GMT 13 Dec 2009
Tony Blair: His visit was a coup for the country’s rulers as his
well-known grin beamed out on state television from a press conference
to homes throughout the small, oil-rich nation Photo: GETTY
The former prime minister flew to Azerbaijan where he met the
country’s president and visited a methanol factory owned by a
multi-millionaire businessman.
His visit was a coup for the country’s rulers as his well-known grin
beamed out on state television from a press conference to homes
throughout the small, oil-rich nation.
Pope Benedict XVI urges pilgrims to fight climate change and reject
consumerismNow opposition groups and British MPs have complained, that
although Mr Blair had every right to visit the country, he missed a
golden opportunity to criticise its human rights abuses. They are
insisting he should donate his fee to charity.
Earlier this year, David Plouffe, a former senior aide to Barack
Obama, was castigated for giving a speech in Azerbaijan – booked
through the same Washington-based public speaking agency as Mr Blair.
In the wake of the outcry he agreed to hand his fee to a group
promoting democracy in the region.
Peter Kilfoyle, a Labour MP who in the mid 1990s helped run Mr Blair’s
Labour leadership campaign, said: "The very least he can do is donate
is fee to a charity that works in the area of human rights.
"He should not be profiting from a country that flagrantly ignores
human rights. There have long been questions about the Azeris and
their approach to human rights."
Norman Baker, a Liberal Democrat MP who has criticised Mr Blair for
the huge sums he has earned out of office, said: "This is dirty money.
It is demeaning for the former British prime minister to hawk himself
around the world getting what cash he can. If he had an ounce of
decency and self-respect he should now give this to an appropriate
outside charity."
The father of Eynulla Fatullayev, a prominent journalist held in
solitary confinement at a freezing Communist-era jail since 2007,
hoped to hear a reference to his son when he switched on his
television at home in Baku, the capital, to watch Mr Blair.
But there was no mention of him, nor of the other 60 political
prisoners held in the nation’s jails. Instead Mr Blair joked about the
weather and praised the £185 million plant and the formaldehyde that
is among its products. He made no reference to Azerbaijan’s political
repression, nor to its dreadful record of business corruption.
Emin Fatullayev, 59, asked angrily: "Why did Tony Blair come here? It
was another blow to us – pure propaganada by the regime. The
government was showing him off and saying: ‘Look who is with us’.
"He was not here to support the Azeri people, or our democracy
movement. He was here to support an authoritarian government, a
dictatorship."
Amnesty International’s UK Campaigns Director Tim Hancock said: "
"We’re extremely alarmed at the way that reporters have been harassed,
beaten up and even jailed just for doing their jobs. Eynulla
Fatullayev is serving an eight-and-a-half-year sentence on trumped up
charges after being critical of the government.
"When international figures make speeches in Azerbaijan they would do
well to remember that their ability to speak unhindered couldn’t be
more different to that of people actually living there."
Mr Blair was invited to Azerbaijan by Nizami Piriyev, the owner of
methanol manufacturing company AzMeCo, to witness the signing of a
loan agreement with the European Bank for Reconstruction and
Development.
The Piriyev family is one of the richest in Azerbaijan. Mr Piriyev,
51, ran part of Russia’s state oil firm Gazprom, before setting up a
company that won a £2billion contract to develop a petrochemical
complex in Syria. In 2006, he returned to Azerbaijan to start AzMeCo.
He has previously worked as a lobbyist for the Azerbaijani government
in the US. His son Nasib, AzMeCo’s vice president, is currently the
benefactor of the Buta Festival of Azerbaijani Arts which runs in
London until March.
Mr Blair also met privately the country’s president Ilham Aliyev – a
friend of Mr Piriyev – who took power in 2003 following the death of
his father, a former Communist boss. He joined a working dinner before
flying out of the country later the same day.
Mr Aliyev is considered so repressive that dissidents look back on his
father’s rule as a golden age of freedom. Mr Blair met the president
privately during his visit.
In Azerbaijan, opposition parties suffer harassment, elections are not
considered fair and anyone who complains about the government must
expect to be sacked.
Fabulous oil wealth – production quadrupled between 1997 and 2008 to
875,000 barrels a day – has strengthened the family’s rule.
Azeris complain that the oil business has made Western powers less
willing to press for political reform. Britain, by far the biggest
foreign investor in the oil business, has the worst reputation for not
speaking about about human rights.
There is no lack of support in Britain for Mr Fatullayev’s son in his
terrible plight. Thanks to a letter-writing campaign organised by
Amnesty International, he has cardboard boxes overflowing with
messages in his modest bungalow home.
He pulled one out at random from the Mayor of Woking, and then another
from a German student praising his son’s brave journalism.
A jolly man who laughed mischievously as he showed his son’s press
cuttings, Mr Fatullayev was himself sacked as a jeweller 10 years ago,
when his son’s mockery of the ruling elite began in earnest.
Eynulla Fatullayev had used satire cleverly. A photograph of a beaming
President Aliyev which ran on the front page of his newspaper showed
him enveilnig a plaque, its wording doctored to read, "Mafia". In
another edition a cartoon of Mr Aliyev’s moustachioed face was
superimposed on a dragon’s body.
But the 48-year-old technocrat and energy expert, is not known for his
sense of humour. The journalist was charged with slandering the army
in a different story, and jailed for eight and a half years. Nobody
doubted the real reason.
Another father upset by Tony Blair is Hikmet Hajizadeh, 56, a former
ambassador to Russia. His son Adnan, 26, made a spoof film in which he
and friends pretended to be government ministers who had bought
donkeys from Germany for £12,000 each – a satirical swipe at official
dishonesty which became a hit on YouTube. The slight was compounded by
fact that the president’s nickname is "donkey".
Soon afterwards the young man had his nose broken in a beating by
thugs – but when he complained to police he was himself arrested and
charged with hooliganism.
Tony Blair was challenged by Azeri journalists about the case at his
press conference but dodged the question, and to their disgust said
only that he agreed with the Foreign Office’s official statement. That
deplores the arrest of Mr Hakizadeh and a fellow blogger last July.
"I wish Mr Blair had said something stronger," the father sighed. "But
he came here as a businessman didn’t he? Not as a democratic leader."
Thanks to the corruption that his son was satirising, the mainly
secular Islamic nation of eight million is near the bottom of
Transparency International’s world league table – ranked at 143 out of
180 nations, below Pakistan and only slightly better than Zimbabwe.
Poverty in much of the country contrasts with the elegant centre of
Baku, with its restaurants, boutiques and roads busy with Mercedes and
BMWs. The oil boom has brought in thousands of British oil workers
since 2006, many of them Scots.
Vugar Gojayev, one of the few human rights campaigners left in the
country, said: "If you criticise the government, then you go to jail.
Political opposition has been swept away. There is an atmosphere of
fear, a police regime and KGB methods."
Mr Gojayev said Britain rarely speaks out about abuses – in contrast
to Norway, the second-biggest foreign investor.
Norway’s ambassador Jon Ramberg said: "We believe in long-term
stability and in our opinion that can only be built on democracy and
the rule of law."
The British Embassy would not speak to The Sunday Telegraph.
Dissidents say it recently refused to join a planned group of European
embassies which would have pressured the government, effectively
scuppering the plan.
Murad Gasanly, an opponent of the president living in the UK, said Mr
Blair should use his fee to fund lawyers trying to free political
prisoners from jail. "He should give the money to their families to
provide legal support," said Mr Gasanly.
Mr Blair’s spokesman said: "This was a one-off speaking engagement,
organised by the Washington Speakers Bureau in the usual way. It was
not organised by the Government. Neither Tony Blair or Tony Blair
Associates has any commercial or pro bono relationship with the
president or the government of Azerbaijan."