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  • Trapped In Baku

    TRAPPED IN BAKU

    Foreign Policy
    Feb 11 2015

    A press freedom advocate -- and husband of an American servicewoman --
    went to the U.S. embassy in Azerbaijan, fearing for his life. But he
    was turned away.

    by Michael Weiss

    An Azerbaijani dissident married to a U.S. servicewoman has spent the
    last half-year living in the Swiss embassy in Baku, denied protection
    by the American embassy there. The 35-year-old human rights defender
    Emin Huseynov has long been persecuted by the authoritarian government
    of Ilham Aliyev and since August 2014 has been hosted by the Swiss
    embassy for humanitarian reasons after he went into hiding last summer,
    fearing his arrest was imminent.

    The Swiss television show "Rundschau" broke the news today, and the
    Swiss Ministry of Foreign Affairs confirmed Huseynov's residence in
    its embassy. The story of how he got there six-and-a-half months
    ago resembles an international thriller redolent of Argo, though
    conspicuously absent of U.S. involvement. It was relayed exclusively
    to Foreign Policy by sources close to Huseynov in advance of today's
    announcement.

    As chairman of the Institute for Reporters' Freedom and Safety (IRFS),
    a local NGO, Huseynov is one of many victims of an intense government
    crackdown on free speech and civil society that has taken place
    in Azerbaijan over the past year -- a crackdown that has surprised
    even hardened human rights monitors. In May 2014, Anar Mammadli, the
    chairman of the highly regarded Election Monitoring and Democracy
    Studies Center (EMDS), was sentenced to five-and-a-half years in
    prison for spurious charges which included tax evasion and illegal
    entrepreneurship; his real crime, according to human rights monitors,
    was reporting on the Aliyev government's election-rigging. Meanwhile,
    the executive director of EMDS, Bashir Suleymanli, got three-and-a-half
    years in jail. Then in July, Leyla Yunus, a noted democracy and peace
    activist working on the reconciliation of the Nagorno-Karabakh crisis,
    was arrested on a suite of similarly concocted charges that include
    high treason and spying on behalf of Armenia; her husband, Arif Yunis,
    was also taken into custody on treason and fraud allegations. Finally
    in August, two Azerbaijani legal activists -- Rasul Jafarov and
    Intigam Aliyev -- were rounded up.

    That same month, fearing for his life, Huseynov went into hiding.

    According to sources, his bank accounts were first frozen in June,
    and yet Huseynov was still able to leave the country, which he did
    to attend a session at the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council
    of Europe (PACE) in Strasbourg where he and Jafarov put on an event
    exposing Aliyev's suffocation of civil society in Azerbaijan. After
    Jafarov was detained, Huseynov sensed the net closing on him. In
    early August, Huseynov attended an event at the U.S. embassy in Baku
    where he eventually found himself alone with the Charge d'Affaires
    Dereck Hogan. The American ambassador, Richard Morningstar, had
    left Azerbaijan only a week earlier, leaving the embassy without a
    diplomatic head. According to sources, Huseynov scribbled a note on a
    piece of paper which he passed to Hogan: "What kind of assistance can
    you provide me? I am in danger of arrest." Hogan said he couldn't help.

    "[Huseynov] never had a bad relationship with Dereck," said one source
    who requested anonymity. "He never criticized the embassy and tried
    to be diplomatic even when he criticized U.S. policy in Azerbaijan."

    Foreign Policy tried to contact Hogan at the embassy and was referred
    instead to the State Department in Washington. No one responded to
    inquiries by press time.

    On August 6, Huseynov tried to leave the country to receive medical
    treatment in Turkey, but was stopped by border control and turned
    back. The day after that, August 8, colleagues from his office called
    to inform him that the headquarters of IRFS was being surveilled by
    state security, and warned Huseynov not to come to work. The office
    was then raided, prompting rumors in the Azerbaijani press that
    Huseynov had been arrested. He hadn't. Instead, he went into hiding,
    which only amplified speculation as to his whereabouts. Press reports
    said he had fled to the U.S. embassy, which on August 12 put out
    a statement denying that it was harboring him -- a two-line denial
    that many familiar with the case said read uncomfortably like a total
    repudiation of an embattled dissident. But Washington wasn't totally
    unsympathetic to his predicament: the U.S. mission to the Organization
    for Security and Cooperation in Europe issued a blanket statement
    on August 14 calling on Baku to "halt the continuing arrests of
    peaceful activists, to stop freezing organizations' and individuals'
    bank accounts, and to release those who have been incarcerated
    in connection with the exercise of their fundamental freedoms,"
    mentioning the Yunuses, Jafarov, and Huseynov by name.

    But the fact that Huseynov, while not a U.S. citizen himself, has
    an American wife ought to have made his case more of a priority to
    the State Department, according to human rights monitors and one
    ex-diplomat.

    A few European countries allegedly offered to take Huseynov in; he
    opted for Switzerland, owing to its embassy's proximity to his hideout.

    "He totally changed his physical appearance, he dyed his hair, wore
    a disguise," one source relayed.

    "He totally changed his physical appearance, he dyed his hair, wore
    a disguise," one source relayed. "Emin even did test runs: he'd go
    out in disguise to see if people recognized him."

    On August 18, he made a play for the embassy grounds. A car driven
    by an Azeri confidante, who evidently had to flee the country after
    his identity was uncovered, dropped him off a few blocks away. The
    authorities were aware that Huseynov was attempting refuge in a
    foreign country and had begun staking out embassy entrances in Baku.

    "Emin was walking to the embassy and realized there's tons of
    plainclothes cops," said a source familiar with Huseynov's story.

    "They tried to talk to him. He spoke to them in broken English to
    try and throw them off. They asked to see his passport. 'No, no,'
    he said, 'the Swiss have my passport.' They didn't recognize him at
    first. He rang the doorbell to the embassy, as the cops were still
    interrogating him. Someone opened the door and pulled him inside. A
    five-second hesitation and Emin swears he'd have been nabbed."

    Huseynov would spend the next several months living on Swiss soil in
    his native country, flanked by a 24-hour police cordon of the embassy.

    The Aliyev government has not publicly acknowledged his presence in
    the Swiss embassy and, until today, the Swiss hadn't either, although
    they've been negotiating with the Aliyev government for Huseynov's
    safe passage out of Azerbaijan.

    His case was known to a number of human rights monitors that Foreign
    Policy contacted for comment, such as Giorgi Gogia, the South Caucasus
    specialist at Human Rights Watch. "I know that the Swiss government
    has been negotiating at the highest level possible with Azerbaijan,"
    Gogia said. "And I know the Azerbaijan government has been against
    letting Emin leave. It's crazy that this is ongoing."

    Huseynov's safe conduct out of the country is particularly critical
    because the last time he was arrested -- for attending a party
    celebrating the birthday of Che Guevara -- he was beaten by police so
    badly he wound up in intensive care and had to be treated for head and
    brain trauma. That was in 2008. Huseynov's younger brother, Mehman,
    a video blogger and photojournalist who also works for IRFS, was also
    targeted by the police in 2012 for drawing attention to human rights
    violations during the Eurovision Song Contest held in Baku that year.

    In October 2014, Mehman was again arrested and brought to the
    Investigation Department of the Prosecutor General for Serious Crimes.

    He, too, has also been barred from leaving Azerbaijan.

    According to Gogia, while Azerbaijan's record on human rights has
    always been dismal, conditions have grown infinitely worse recently.

    "Three major things have happened that have never happened before.

    First, the government arrested the towering figures of the NGO
    movements. Second, since last January, it hasn't registered a single
    foreign grant. In the past, you had to register a grant at the
    Ministry of Justice, but it was a pro forma procedure and no one was
    refused. Third, the government went after and froze the bank accounts
    of over 50 NGOs and their leaders, including [Huseynov]. Very suddenly,
    from a very bad human rights record, it turned into a closed-country
    human rights record. It was really hard and shocking to see how fast
    the country was closing down. And the perverse irony is that all this
    is taking place as Azerbaijan chairs the Council of Ministers at PACE."

    One former American diplomat questions the U.S. embassy's hands-off
    approach. "If the embassy knew that person was married to an American
    citizen, that would require more than if this were just a normal
    Azerbaijani citizen facing harassment or arrest by the police,"
    said Richard Kauzlarich, who served as ambassador to Azerbaijan in
    1994-1997. "There's not much you can do for your average everyday
    citizen of the country you're embassy is in, but if it's the spouse
    of one our own, that changes things."

    Curiously, while Huseynov was running for his life, another urgent
    human rights episode occurred, again ensnaring the U.S. embassy in
    Baku -- this one seemingly less complicated, however, as it concerned
    someone with dual Azerbaijani-American citizenship.

    Said Nuri, who became a U.S. citizen in 2012 after six years of
    political asylum, was used to traveling back to Azerbaijan without
    incident, albeit with a tail of police surveillance. "The government
    followed me everywhere, took my pictures. Sitting in cafe or restaurant
    -- they put a camera on the next table taping us. Even my friends
    published articles about that," Nuri said. But then, last August, he
    applied for a visa to visit his father, whom he had just discovered
    had been diagnosed with terminal cancer. "I was in Ukraine at the
    time, so I went to the Azerbaijani embassy in Kiev. It took three
    weeks to get the visa. I went to Baku. I stayed seven days with my
    family. Then, when I was trying to fly back to Kiev, the authorities
    told me I couldn't leave. 'There's a travel ban on you,' the minister
    of national security and general prosecutor office's said."

    So Nuri went to the U.S. embassy. "They were confused. It took them
    two hours to get back to me to confirm the travel ban. But they
    didn't give me much information. 'It's a domestic issue,' I was
    told. The next day, the general prosecutor released statement that
    I need to be questioned regarding some criminal charges. I hired a
    lawyer, went to the prosecutor's office and was interrogated for six
    hours. They asked me about affiliation with the U.S. government, if
    I was CIA. They asked about my relationship to NGOs, journalists. How
    did I get asylum and then citizenship? Why did I travel to Ukraine so
    often? Why did I have pictures from the Maidan [the central square in
    Kiev then roiled in revolution]? They were accusing me of espionage
    and all these questions related to U.S. government and U.S.-funded
    programs, the National Endowment for Democracy, and so on."

    Nuri's lawyer informed him that the authorities planned to charge
    him with spying on behalf of the United States. But the U.S. embassy,
    Nuri insists, was useless.

    Nuri's lawyer informed him that the authorities planned to charge him
    with spying on behalf of the United States. But the U.S. embassy,
    Nuri insists, was useless. He obtained letters from then-Freedom
    House President David Kramer and Sen. John McCain arguing his brief,
    but the diplomatic response from an embassy official Nuri declined
    to name was, roughly: "We understand you're our citizen, but the
    problem is you're on foreign soil and this country is claiming you're
    also their citizen. It's a sovereign country, so we can't intervene
    in their domestic policies." The Aliyev government, meanwhile, was
    trying to co-opt him, promising him a better life if he remained in
    Azerbaijan and publicly repudiated his American citizenship. Where
    gentle persuasion failed, the government resorted to other means:
    "They taped me having sex with my girlfriend and tried to blackmail
    me," says Nuri. The whole ordeal then ended almost as spontaneously as
    it had begun. After eight days of intense grilling and intimidation,
    Nuri was deported and his Azerbaijani citizenship revoked. He now
    lives in Chicago.

    "Azerbaijan has shown they're prepared to do unpleasant things to
    American citizens and people associated with American organizations,
    such as RFE/RL," Ambassador Kauzlarich said, referring to the December
    2014 imprisonment of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty contributor
    Khadija Ismayilova, a pioneering anti-corruption journalist who
    previously had her home bugged and, like Nuri, was surreptitiously
    recorded having sex, the tape of which was leaked on the Internet.

    According to Kauzlarich, the government has now all but declared Cold
    War on the United States. "In my time, having an association with an
    American didn't buy you protection but there was a willingness not to
    do certain things that would cause problems in the relationship. Now
    I just don't think they care."

    For dissidents, the worry is that the Obama administration doesn't
    seem particularly bothered by what's happening in the oil-rich
    authoritarianism on the Caspian, which, as I previously reported,
    has spent the last half-decade expending enormous energy and money
    lobbying the United States and Europe for political influence.

    "I went to an event the other day here in Washington where State
    Department officials announced that they're going to pursue engagement
    policy with the Aliyev government," Alakbar Raufoglu, an opposition
    journalist at the D.C.-based TURAN News Agency, told FP. "They didn't
    mention they're going to highlight a crackdown on democratic activity.

    They said they'll support RFE/RL as much as they can but engagement
    policy is number one right now." For Raufoglu, the future of this
    relationship can be seen in microcosm in a video released just
    yesterday by the newly appointed U.S. ambassador to Azerbaijan,
    Robert Cekuta. "Look at what he said the U.S. priorities are: First is
    regional security, second is economic growth, and third is democratic
    development. Nothing has changed even as the regime has grown worse,"
    said Raufoglu. "This is a chilling message that they're leaving
    us behind."

    As for Huseynov, now that his whereabouts are internationally known,
    his fate remains uncertain. Living out of an embassy can be a long-time
    affair. Just ask WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, who obtained asylum
    from Ecuador fearing extradition to Sweden to face questioning over
    allegations of sexual assault.* He has not left the Ecuadorian embassy
    in London for nearly three years. The Swiss mission in Baku is hardly
    a sprawling palatial compound. "It's a little tiny embassy," a source
    involved in his case said.

    http://foreignpolicy.com/2015/02/11/trapped-in-baku-azerbaijan-emil-huseynov-swiss-embassy/

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