The Daily Aliyev

"Every morning, Azerbaijan's two state newspapers - one in Azerbaijani, one in Russian - land on my desk in AFP's Caucasus bureau in Baku. Scintillating reading they are not. At least two-thirds of their front pages are filled with photos of President Ilham Aliyev shaking hands with visiting dignitaries, heading cabinet meetings or making speeches. The rest is dry reports of his meetings, verbatim copies of his speeches or texts of presidential decrees."

In the wake of the Che Guevara party raid in Baku, AFP's Caucasus bureau chief Mike Mainville examines what's going on with freedom of speech in Azerbaijan here.

A 'Well-Planned Provocation'

More on the strange and unpleasant tale of the Che Guevera party bust in Baku, from my column in The Moscow Times. On the same day as Che was honoured with a new statue in his Argentine hometown (and a sculpture in Beijing), his birthday was marked in a rather different way here in the Caucasus:

It’s been some time since the name of Che Guevara struck fear into capitalist souls. Now the Argentine revolutionary is more of a money-spinner himself; a hip totem used to sell countless numbers of T-shirts and other trinkets carrying his iconic bearded visage. But in Azerbaijan, it seems, his spirit still has the power to unsettle. Earlier this month, an event to celebrate what would have been Guevara’s 80th birthday at a cafe in the capital, Baku, was raided by police. Around 20 of the young revellers were detained for questioning, including members of the ‘Che Guevara Fan Club’ and journalists covering the event.

One of them was Emin Huseynov, chairman of the Institute for Reporter Safety and Freedom, a tireless campaigner for media rights in a country where opposition journalists are regularly jailed for libelling government officials. At the police station, Huseynov says he was taken into a room where a man in civilian clothes and sunglasses, who had led the raid, pulled out a pistol and declared: “I will destroy you.” Then he started hitting the campaigner with the gun. Shortly afterwards, Huseynov passed out and was taken to hospital with head injuries.

Azeri officials deny this. The police initially claimed that Huseynov had actually injured himself. Then the Interior Ministry stated that Huseynov wasn’t beaten up, but was hospitalised because he fell ill due to a previous illness. This is a reference to the trauma suffered by the campaigner when he was seriously assaulted by police during presidential elections in Azerbaijan five years ago.

Then came a response from Azerbaijan’s presidential administration, fingering Huseynov as some kind of agent provocateur for unnamed forces, flitting from outrage to outrage. “Unfortunately, Emin Huseynov has repeatedly ended up at the centre of these kinds of well-planned provocations,” an official said. “Missionaries arrange some party - Emin Huseynov goes there. Someone organises something in front of the presidential administration - he is there again.”

As this statement suggests, Huseynov isn’t exactly the darling of the Azeri authorities. Before starting his media-freedom organisation, he led a pro-democracy movement called Magam (‘It’s Time’), modelled on the youth resistance groups involved in revolutions in Serbia, Georgia and Ukraine.

But what is curious is why the police felt the need to bust the Che Guevara party at all, particularly considering that only around 50 people were there. The Azeri Interior Ministry said it was because the event was “unauthorised”, while the presidential administration official suggested it was “not the right time” to hold such meetings. When that time will come in Azerbaijan remains unclear.

Che Party Busted in Baku

The Azeri media-rights campaigner, Emin Huseynov, is in hospital in Baku after allegedly being beaten up by police after a party to celebrate what would have been the 80th birthday of Che Guevara. It's unclear why the cops raided the party, which was also reportedly attended by a representative of the Cuban embassy in Baku. Around 20 people were detained, including Huseynov, who (according to his colleagues) was ordered into a room by a man wearing civilian clothes and sunglasses. The mystery man then started hitting Huseynov with a pistol, causing him to be hospitalised.

The Baku police have been reported by Radio Liberty as saying that Huseynov injured himself.

'It Looks Like a Neglected Zoo'

"The first thing that registers is the putrid smell of animal faeces, then from inside one building comes a primeval squawking that sounds like a child being tortured. Cage after cage of distraught-looking monkeys come into view, nearly 300 in all, gnawing at mandarins and scampering around their enclosures..." A very different view of the primate research centre in Abkhazia (featured in my last post), from an article in The Independent by my Moscow colleague Shaun Walker - with some unsettling detail about the alleged attempt to cross-breed apes and humans to create a kind of 'Soviet superman', "inhumanly strong and mentally dulled", to help industrialise the Soviet empire. Read more here.

The Lost Monkeys of Abkhazia

A new Dutch film, The Lost Colony, looks at the once-famous primate research centre in Georgia's breakaway region of Abkhazia, where in Soviet times, scientists apparently tried to create a cross-breed hybrid of monkeys and humans. The centre, like much of Abkhazia, was destroyed during the civil war in the early 1990s. A few people believe that some of the monkeys, who fled like so many human refugees, are still hiding somewhere in the woods, and they even leave food out for them, hoping they will someday return.

Salute the Flag

Australia has just started pulling its troops out of Iraq, but Georgia is still standing proudly shoulder-to-shoulder with its allies in Washington, and this small country remains the third-largest contributor of soldiers to the slightly wilting 'coalition of the willing', after the US and Britain.

Troop numbers in Iraq (from Reuters):

United States 155,000

Britain 4,000

Georgia 2,000

South Korea 933

Poland 900

Australia 515
Romania 500

El Salvador 280

Azerbaijan 150

Bulgaria 150

Mongolia 100

Czech Republic 96

Albania 70

Denmark 55

Lithuania 53

Armenia 50

Estonia 38

Bosnia-Herzegovina 37

Macedonia 33

Kazakhstan 29

Moldova 11

Portugal 7

Latvia 3

Slovakia 2

Singapore 1

PS: One does wonder why Mongolia felt it necessary to send 100 soldiers to join the US mission - and how lonely that solitary grunt from Singapore must feel out there. At least the two Slovaks can talk to each other...