FREEDOM HOUSE NEW OBJECT OF AZERBAIJAN’S HATRED
By Ivan Gharibyan

news.am
Jan 14 2010
Armenia

Whatever we may say, official Baku has never been able to forgive the
United States for launching the Armenia-Turkey normalization process
and calling for normalization without any preconditions. Throughout the
recent months the Azerbaijani authorities have been seeking occasions
for attacks on the United States. The developments are perceived with
even greater pain by the official Azeri propaganda.

Late last December all the central Azeri media outlets were indignant
at the U.S.A. for its decision to provide essential financial
aid to Nagorno-Karabakh. After the efforts failed, Baku began to
look for "fresh food" for its worn-out propaganda machine and has
found it – this time it is a regular report by the Freedom House,
a Washington-based international non-governmental organization.

The point is that the report describes Azerbaijan as "not free,"
while Armenia is "a partly free" country. It was enough for Baku to
start telling "awful stories" about Freedom House being incompetent
and biased. Well, the organization dared challenge Ilham Aliyev’s
policy of constructing "democratic and prospering" Azerbaijan.

This time, the key role in "exposing" the U.S. human rights
organization has been assigned to Elnur Aslanov, Head of the Political
Analysis and Information Department, Azerbaijani Presidential
Administration. He began telling tales about the Government’s concern
for mass media and non-governmental organizations, without saying a
single word about how this concern is shown in practice. Was Aslanov
to tell about the Presidential Administration’s total control over
all the TV channels, as it is practiced in such rogue states as
Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan, or about the Azeri NGOs, which first
of all swear their loyalty to the "national leader" Heydar Aliyev
and his son Ilham? Aslanov also held back the truth about dozens of
Azerbaijani journalists losing years in jails.

However, Azerbaijan’s campaign against Freedom House is absolutely
pointless. One needs great imagination to accuse the organization of
lobbying for Armenian interests — its distinctly negative appraisals
of the Armenian authorities’ actions during the 2008 post-election
period are still fresh in our mind. If the situation is even worse
in Azerbaijan they had better try to improve it instead of going off
into hysterics.