Christopher Atamian
Haykaram Nahapetyan
Who’s out there? A
bewildered Hamlet queries at the beginning of Shakespeare’s greatest of
plays. In the case of Azerbaijan, a dictatorial Caviar Republic on the
Caspian, the answer is a particular type of insane unscrupulousness that
is perfectly in tune with the new wave of right-wing leaders and human
rights violators coming to power and ensconced everywhere from
Washington D.C. to Moscow. Journalists facing violence, even death, is
nothing new but this particular story takes on unique importance
because several governments (Belarus and Azerbaijan) have all
collaborated directly or indirectly in order to persecute an innocent
man—Aleksander Lapshin—as if he were guilty of murder.
In the process, all manner of civilized behavior and inter-state norms seem to have been violated. The outline of this political version of Alice looking down the rabbit hole is relatively simple: blogger Lapshin, who was actually born in the Ukraine, visited the Armenian Republic of Nagorno Karabakh (also known simply as NKR or by its historical Armenian name, Artsakh) in 2011 and then blogged about NKR’s free and sovereign statehood. This won him the immediate enmity of Ilham Aliyev and his cronies in Baku.
In more ways than one
(complexity, historical memory, seemingly unending ethnic conflicts) the
Caucasus is really a Northern extension of the Middle East, part of
what used to be referred to as Asia Minor. For those not well-versed in
the history of the region and the conflict between Armenia and
Azerbaijan, the roots of this particular story go back to 1921, when
another dictator—Joseph Stalin—officially placed the Armenian enclave
within the territory of Soviet Azerbaijan. This in spite of the fact
that 95% of Nagorno Karabakh’s population was Armenian and had
repeatedly requested to be part of the Armenian SSR. The move belonged
to Stalin’s strategy of divide and conquer, wherein he arbitrarily cut
up the map of the region to make sure that the different ethnic groups
would remain in conflict between themselves Abkhazia, Ossetia and
Georgia suffered similar fates, as did ethnic groups within most of the
15 Soviet Republics. The Muslim Tatars in the Crimea faced even worse
treatment and were summarily killed and deported to Central Asia.
Fast-forward some seventy
years later to 1991 when, encouraged by the Baltic independence
movements to the North and Gorbachev’s policy of perestroika,
Nagorno Karabakh voted to reunify with Armenia. Eventually the republic
declared outright independence, which led to a bloody war with its
neighbor Azerbaijan and a thorough routing of Azeri forces. Although its
sovereignty has only been officially recognized by 8 US states and
Australia’s New South Wales, Nagorno Karabakh has steadfastly held its
ground. Meanwhile, Azerbaijan and the Aliyev clan that has ruled the
country with an iron fist for a quarter century, have spent literally
billions of dollars to strengthen the country’s army in a futile attempt
to regain territory by force of international appeal and military
incursions. The US, Russia and France have tried to mediate a peaceful
solution, which remains as seemingly intractable as the
Israeli-Palestinian conflict to the South.
Among other ploys, Baku has
continued to insist that any foreigner who visits NKR has actually
illegally trespassed onto Azeri lands. The Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Azerbaijan has declared 683 of these unfortunates as personae non grata.
When you consider that over 25,000 tourists have actually visited NKR
in the last two years alone, you realize how incomplete the list is and
how absurd Baku’s persecution of Aleksander Lapshin. Of course, Azeri
officials can only blacklist those people whose names come to them
through print and social media or other public avenues. The US
astronaut Charles Duke, the Spanish opera star Montserrat Caballe and
France’s incumbent Minister of the Interior Bruno Le Roux all figure
prominently on this list. Duke was the 10th human being to walk on the
moon aboard Apollo 16, but after visiting NKR, he may never set foot in
Azerbaijan—assuming he’d ever want to.
Lapshin is a traveling
journalist who has visited over 120 countries in his lifetime. In late
2016, in a decision that he must surely now regret, he decided to come
to Belarus: the Belarussian police summarily arrested him, as per
President Ilham Aliyev’s request, and extradited him to Baku on February
7. The Committee to Protect Journalists
has twice demanded his unconditional release. Not surprisingly, both
Aliyev and Belarussian President Aleksander Lukashenko are on Reporters
Without Borders’ Predators of Press Freedom list. Lukashenko originally cited Lapshin’s supposed presence on Interpol’s
database as grounds for his decision to detain him. Interpol
headquarters in Lyon, France deny its participation in the blogger’s
arrest: “We have checked and confirm that the subject is absent from
our databases,” Interpol’s Command and Coordination Center recently stated.
Why Azeri authorities have
decided to persecute Lapshin in particular remains partly a mystery,
apart from the fact that Baku seems to be losing all hope of ever
regaining NKR—by either violent or legal means. Aliyev even dispatched a
special plane in order to fly Lapshin to Baku, although paradoxically
he was banned from entering Azerbaijan six years ago. Lapshin has
officially been charged with illegally entering Nagorno Karabakh and for
“making statements against the Azeri Republic,” which may bring a
sentence of up to 8 years eight years in prison. While a
state-sponsored lawyer has been appointed for Lapshin, the first charge
is somewhat crazy given the fact that NKR is now entirely under Armenian
control—it is somewhat akin to Germany asking for someone visiting
Alsace-Lorraine (today in France) to be extradited for violating German
territorial integrity! The second charge of course smacks of the worst
of state fascism and is a clear violation of the right to free speech.
As Beatrice Evelyn Hall famously wrote in her 1903 biography of the
great French writer, The Friends of Voltaire: “I disapprove of
what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.” For
Armenian National Committee of America (ANCA) Executive Director Aram
Hamparian, the Lapshin case is just another example of Azerbaijan’s
attempt isolate NKR internationally, as he recently stated in another
publication: “Azerbaijan got Belarus to extradite Lapshin for the
‘crime’ of visiting Artsakh in order to scare others, including
journalists, from ever visiting there. That is Baku’s aim. To isolate
and undermine Artsakh—on the battlefield, in the media, and in the
political world,” Hamparian wrote in a recent Facebook post.
Not surprisingly perhaps, strange happenings have occurred on Lapshin’s Live Journal blog
since he arrived in Baku: his posts about NKR have disappeared and
Nagorno-Karabakh has been removed from the list of countries that he has
visited. According to the CPJ, some 259 journalists worldwide
currently languish in jail, six in Azerbaijan alone, a remarkable number
for the small country of seven million on the Caspian. Reaction around
the world in defense of Lapshin has been swift. And in a possibly
related answer to Azeri tactics, Russia recently detained 200 Azeri
citizens in a sports hall in Dagestan, citing territorial violations as
the reason for their actions.
The question now becomes:
who in power will stand up for Lapshin and help to free the unfortunate
blogger? Neither Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu nor the
respective Presidents of Ukraine or Russia seem in any hurry to come to
their citizen’s aide. As this piece goes to press Lapshin’s future—and
that of imprisoned journalists everywhere—remains uncertain.
To read Lapshin’s blog as it currently stands, click here:
https://www.google.com/url?q=http%3A%2F%2Fpuerrtto.livejournal.com%2F
"The Huffington Post," February 22, 2017
"The Huffington Post," February 22, 2017
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