Gulf Times, Qatar
Aug 8 2005

Azerbaijan relaunches opposition crackdown

Published: Monday, 8 August, 2005, 12:16 PM Doha Time

BAKU: The arrest of an opposition leader in former Soviet Azerbaijan
over an alleged coup plot hatched by Armenian secret police and a US
democracy group reactivates an opposition crackdown in the oil rich
republic ahead of parliamentary elections.
Prosecutors on Thursday announced the arrest of Ruslan Bashirli, the
leader of the Yeni Fikir youth group modelled on movements that
helped topple regimes in Ukraine and Georgia recently, on charges of
attempting `to take power by force’.
His detention came just two months after the Azerbaijani authorities
had lifted a ban on public demonstrations that had been in place
since the contested 2003 presidential elections which ended in
rioting and hundreds of arrests.
The two days of rioting that enveloped the capital Baku in 2003 put
Azerbaijan in the international headlines. Since then, the
authorities have clamped down on dissent, loosening the unspoken ban
on rallies only in June after heavy Western diplomatic pressure.
Prosecutors accuse Bashirli of accepting money from Armenian
operatives posing as democracy activists from Georgia and Armenia in
order to finance a revolt planned by the US-based National Democratic
Institute (NDI).
While in Georgia in July, Bashirli told the Armenians that he
represented forces `acting on the instructions of the National
Democratic Institute of the USA’, according to a prosecutors’
statement.
He said he had received `specific instructions from representatives
of this organisation to prepare a revolution in Azerbaijan’, the
statement said.
Azerbaijan fought and lost a bitter war with Armenia over the
mountainous region of Nagorno Karabakh in the early 1990s and the two
former Soviet republics have yet to sign a formal peace deal.
Both Yeni Fikir and NDI denied they were plotting to oust the regime
of president Ilham Aliyev, with the US group’s Azerbaijan director
Christy Quirk saying the allegations `just aren’t true’.