by EMMA HUGHES and JAMES MARRIOTT
Out of the shadows: Azerbaijan’s oily secrets need to be exposed PHOTO/© drmakkoy/Getty
The world’s media will be focused on Azerbaijan this month, but it is not the European Games that they should be reporting on, write Emma Hughes and James Marriott.
40-Oil-pump_opt.jpeg [Related Image]
Out of the shadows: Azerbaijan’s oily secrets need to be exposed. © drmakkoy/Getty
On the evening of 12 June, the Baku 2015 European Games in Azerbaijan will begin. Fireworks will burst out of the National Stadium into the city sky. The roar of the spectators and music from the athletics ground will be heard across the hot metropolis and far out over the Caspian Sea.
Across Europe and beyond, the opening ceremony will be followed on TVs and laptops. Fifty nations and 6,000 athletes will be taking part in the Games, which have been dubbed ‘the great coming-out party of Azerbaijan’.
Rewind to April and, at the Court of Grave Crimes in central Baku, a sandy wind is swirling grit into people’s eyes. A young man emerges from a doorway. Arms behind his back and eyes watering, he is pushed head first into a waiting van.
The man is Rasul Jafarov, and he has just been sentenced to six and a half years for a crime he didn’t commit.
Young, handsome and charismatic, Jafarov shot to prominence in Azerbaijan when he spearheaded the Sing for Democracy campaign in 2012. The campaign highlighted the lack of democracy in a country where the ruling Aliyev family has held on to power through fraudulent elections, attacking independent media and arresting people for holding so much as a flashmob.
Euro-pop is a serious matter for the Aliyevs. The oil-funded dynasty is obsessed with vanity projects (for a few precious weeks Baku had the tallest flagpole in the world, until Tajikstan built a taller one) and the Eurovision Song Contest, hosted by Azerbaijan in 2012, was the perfect opportunity to show the world that the Aliyevs headed a modern, secular, European country.
So Jafarov caused the regime considerable embarrassment when he persuaded the winner, Loreen, not only to meet with him but to give her public support to Sing for Democracy.
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