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The Hill:Tackling Azerbaijan's Corruption

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  • The Hill:Tackling Azerbaijan's Corruption

    THE HILL:TACKLING AZERBAIJAN'S CORRUPTION

    http://thehill.com/blogs/congress-blog/foreign-policy/280435-tackling-azerbaijans-corruption
    By Harout Harry Semerdjian, Ph.D. candiate, University of Oxford, UK

    - 01/31/13 04:00 PM ET

    In his op-ed entitled "Armenia and Azerbaijan: Arriving at a fair
    and honest discourse," Emil Agazade, while touching on issues only
    peripheral to my original article and best suited to his interests,
    passes all limits of journalistic ethics and crosses into the boundary
    of hate and ignorance.

    Instead of attempting to give Congress a counter-lesson on history
    and geopolitics, I would highly suggest that Emil Agazade first help
    put his own house in order. Transparency International consistently
    ranks Azerbaijan among the most corrupt countries of the world, and
    its president Ilham Aliyev was recently named the "world's most corrupt
    leader" by the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project.

    Journalists in the country continue to suffer from violence and
    threats, and pro-democracy activists have been beaten and imprisoned
    in recent years. The European Parliament has explicitly condemned
    Azerbaijan for "increasing number of incidents of harassment, attacks
    and violence against civil society and social network activists and
    journalists in Azerbaijan."

    This is also the very leadership of a country that makes heroes out
    of axe-murderers such as Ramil Safarov, who was recently pardoned
    despite having killed his fellow Armenian attendee with an axe
    in a NATO-sponsored study program in Hungary. This is also the
    same regime that embarked on a Taliban-style cultural genocide in
    2005 against thousands of medieval Armenian religious monuments in
    Jugha, Nackichevan, which has been well-documented by video footage,
    photographs and advanced satellite imaging. International diplomats
    have been repeatedly banned by Azerbaijani authorities from visiting
    the region, including past and present U.S. Ambassadors to Azerbaijan,
    Matthew Bryza and Richard Morningstar.

    While the petro-dollars of the Aliyev regime fund lobbyists such as
    Emil Agazade to monitor the global media and attempt to suppress
    freedom of information, it would be much wiser for Azerbaijan's
    leadership to spend the money at home, where over 40 percent of the
    rural population live below the poverty line.

    Semerdjian is a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Oxford.

    Read more:
    http://thehill.com/blogs/congress-blog/foreign-policy/280435-tackling-azerbaijans-corruption#ixzz2Jdu9et57
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