English om Azerbajdzjan
Gubad Ibadoghlu’s last wish: ”Impose sanctions”
More and more Azerbaijani democracty activists are demanding that the international community impose sanctions against Azerbaijan. One of them is conscientious prisoner Gubad Ibadoglu.
Av Rasmus Canbäck 13 december, 2023
In a hastily scribbled note in a calendar, the Azerbaijani word ”sanksiya” – ”sanctions” is written in sloppy letters.
Next to the word are a number of names that the relatives and people connected to the political prisoner Gubad Ibadoghlu, were encouraged to call to pass on the message of sanctions.
“My father’s wish is that we work for sanctions against Azerbaijan. It was the last and only message that he insisted on getting out before he was imprisoned”, Zhala Bayramova, Gubad Ibadoghlu’s daughter, tells Blankspot.
She believes that there is no difference between the country and countries like Russia or Belarus.
”Russia and Belarus have sanctions against them from the Western world. We who are exposed to the oppression in Azerbaijan find it difficult to see why Azerbaijan in particular differs from Europe’s other dictatorships”, says Zhala Bayramova.
The case of Gubad Ibadoglu has become known all over the world since he was imprisoned in Azerbaijan in July. Amnesty International categorizes him as a prisoner of conscience, the European Parliament has called for sanctions to be investigated against Azerbaijan, and the editorial pages of The Washington Post write about him regularly.
In the Swedish parliament, when the parties discussed relations with Azerbaijan during the autumn, Gubad Ibadoghlu was one of the talking points for several who advocated for stricter measures against the country.
The economist Gubad Ibadoghlu was arrested in dramatic fashion at the end of July when he and his wife were driving on the outskirts of Baku. He was teaching at the London School of Economics at the time, but was for the first time in several years in Baku to take care of his sick mother.
Before the trip to Azerbaijan, he had just presented plans to start a fund for Azerbaijani students with the money from corruption that had been seized by Western states. He wanted to use them to offer Azerbaijanis an alternative to the state scholarships that require loyalty to the Aliyev regime.
He had also spent the past few years investigating how land in the parts of Nagorno-Karabakh that Azerbaijan took control of after the war in 2020. People with ties to President Ilham Aliyev and Turkey’s Recep Tayyip Erdogan have in recent years taken over large land areas under strange circumstances.
But Gubad Ibadoghlu is not alone in the Azerbaijani prison in calling for sanctions against the country.
The activist Bakhtiyar Hajiyev, who has long worked for the United States to either impose targeted sanctions against individuals or economic sanctions against the entire country, has also had his human rights violated in prison, like Gubad Ibadoghlu.
He was imprisoned just hours after the United States added a few Azerbaijani names to a list of sanctioned individuals who have violated human rights.
After a summit between the EU’s foreign ministers on November 13, the EU Commission’s position on sanctions against Azerbaijan has shifted. Even though several member states demanded that sanctions be investigated immediately, the EU finally settled on a compromise.
According to the Swedish Foreign Ministry, the EU’s common line is that if the situation in the conflict between Azerbaijan and Armenia worsens, due to Azerbaijan’s actions, then sanctions cannot be ruled out as a tool.
In Azerbaijan, Gubad Ibadoghlu and Bakhtiyar Hajiyev are not alone in believing that sanctions are needed to stop the regime. Several democracy activists who Blankspot speaks to say that it is the right way to go and that the opinion has been around for a long time. One activist we speak to, who is anonymous for security reasons, tells us that the lack of sanctions against Azerbaijan enables human rights abuses.
“The leadership of the country has learned that natural resources such as gas and oil are more important than the demands for democratic values for the EU. Ilham Aliyev has understood how he can navigate the diplomatic game, and in the end it goes to us who are fighting for a free society. It is incomprehensible that politicians in the West do not seem to understand the context.”
Since the beginning of the 2010s, the country has undergone a breakdown of civil society that occasionally escalates. The latest escalation began in June with large protests in western Azerbaijan against the expansion of a gold mine.
With the arrest of Gubad Ibadoglu, the persecution of the democratic opposition intensified further. Since then, up to 50 people have been arrested, including six journalists linked to free media.
Top image: A collage of Gubad Ibadoglu in an Azerbaijani prison cell.
