Emil Sanamyan
The last two months have seen an unprecedented crackdown on one of
the pillars of the Aliyev regime in Azerbaijan, the Ministry of National
Security (MNS). Since the Oct. 17 dismissal of Minister Eldar Mahmudov,
some 250 of his subordinates, including most of the senior staff, have
been dismissed. Several dozen of them have been arrested and one of
them, the former deputy director of the national counter-terrorism
center, was reported to have committed suicide last week by hanging
himself in jail.
Over the last decade these included recruitment of a number of
Armenian citizens by Azerbaijani operatives, sometimes posing as
representatives of third countries. Some of these cases led to:
- the February 2005 arrest of Zvartnots Airport engineer Andrey Maziyev, who was charged with spying for the Georgia-based MNS operatives for over five years;
- the December 2005 arrest of Russian citizen Rustem Veliahmetov, who was charged with espionage;
- the October 2009 arrest of Lt. Col. Gevorg Hayrapetyan, who was dismissed from the military in 2007 for an attempt to pass information to Azerbaijani operatives through an Iranian citizen;
- the June 2013 arrest of army contract service member Mane Movsisyan, who was in touch with an Azerbaijani operative pretending to be a Turkish Armenian via social media;
- the January 2014 arrest of Col. Khachik Martirosyan, retired from police in 2011, who reportedly offered services to the Azerbaijani Embassy in Tbilisi, Georgia;
- And just days ago, the arrest of Maj. Garik Marutyan—dismissed from the military in 2014—for sharing “secret” information with Turkey-based Azerbaijani operatives via social media.
Last summer, an Armenian Weekly article
mentioned the existence of a Glendale, Calif. bank account connected to
the MNS, possibly pointing to its efforts to recruit area residents
that also include former Armenian government officials.
At the same time, the MNS helped jail a number of “Armenian spies,”
including several dozen Azerbaijani military personnel (most of them
former POWs), an ethnic Azerbaijani Georgian citizen, and several
domestic critics of the Aliyev regime that most recently included Arif
and Leyla Yunus and journalist Rauf Mirkadyrov. In recent years, all
Armenian military prisoners and civilian hostages captured in Azerbaijan
were presented as either political defectors or spies, resulting in at
least two deaths in custody.
The MNS has also been active in netting Azerbaijani citizens with
Armenian relatives or professional connections—real or manufactured—and
blackmailing these people for money. In one of the more egregious cases,
following the 2009 Eurovision, the MNS harassed individuals who had
voted for Armenia’s entry in the song contest.
MNS ‘Disbanded’
On Dec. 15, Aliyev formally disbanded the MNS, establishing in its
place two agencies: the State Security Service (SSS), which will inherit
most MNS functions including the Israeli-supplied surveillance
apparatus, and the Foreign Intelligence Service (FIS). To be sure this
move had nothing to do with the MNS’s multitude of human rights
transgressions, including the assassination of government critics and
the jailing and harassment of hundreds of others. But the move does
offer a form of “rough justice”: the MNS official who reportedly
committed suicide this week was involved in blackmailing the country’s
leading investigative journalist Khadija Ismayilova, now serving a
7.5-year prison sentence.
The SSS will now be led by Madat Guliyev, 57, who, like his
predecessor Eldar Mahmudov, spent most of his life in the police force.
Guliyev was awarded the “National Hero” title for his loyalty to the
Aliyev regime during its crackdown on the special-designation police
(known by its Russian acronym OMON) in March 1995. Guliyev led the
Interior Ministry’s organized crime and narcotics divisions at the time
when Interior Ministry personnel were actively engaged in extrajudicial
assassinations, kidnappings, and racketeering, which were publicized
through the so-called Haji Mamedov case in 2005 (ironically, Mahmudov
and his people delivered the “rough justice” in that case). Since 2011,
Guliyev has been chief of Azerbaijan’s prisons, which house more than
22,000 inmates with an estimated 100 political prisoners among them.
The new FIS head, Orkhan Sultanov, 38, is less known. According to
Azerbaijani media, he previously worked for the MNS foreign intelligence
directorate, including under diplomatic cover at the Azerbaijani
Embassy in London between 2007 and 2012. Between 2008 and 2014, Sultanov
was also a Ph.D. candidate at King’s College London, working on a
dissertation about the Karabagh conflict. According to his lead academic
advisor Prof. Domitilla Sagramoso, while Sultanov did not complete his
Ph.D., “He was a brilliant student, with a sharp mind, and an ability to
express himself clearly and convincingly. He was very objective and
ready to learn new ideas and concepts. But above all he was a very kind
and generous person.” Sagramoso expressed hope that Sultanov would
complete his degree in the future.
Another member of academia who met Sultanov in London also described
him as “smart, discreet, focused, and calm.” Speaking on condition of
anonymity, the academic said that unlike other Azerbaijani students he
had met, Sultanov was “very courteous and formal, not combative or
defensive.”
Both Guliyev and Sultanov are political lightweights that appear to
be compromise figures intended to placate the major rival clan groups in
Azerbaijan. While they project a degree of intellectualism, the
now-ousted Mahmudov did the same at the time of his appointment. It
remains to be seen if these replacements will result in any changes to
the heavily propagandistic style of their predecessors that has been
dictated by the political leadership. What is clear is that they will
continue to keep targeting what Aliyev termed Azerbaijan’s “number one
enemy”—the Armenians.
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