Silk Road Reporters
March 14 2015

Expensive European Games Anger Azerbaijani Locals

Published by Aydin Mammadov March 14, 2015

Having already spent a fortune on the upcoming European Games
scheduled for this June, the Azerbaijani government is facing
increasing outrage from the public after news surfaced that they would
be paying for the accommodation of every participant in the games.

Citizens are worried that the European Olympics will be a burden on
their shoulders, and analysts say the government should step back from
committing to such a costly vanity project during the current economic
crisis. Meanwhile, human rights defenders are calling for boycotting
the games due to a wide variety of violations.

Who’s paying the bill?

In recent weeks, British media outlets have reported that the
government of Azerbaijan will be paying for the participation of all
British athletes in European Olympics that will be held in Baku in
June. The UK is sending 160 athletes, three times more than were sent
to the 2014 Sochi Olympics. Following this announcement, the
government further disclosed its plans to pay for the accommodation,
airfare and other costs for all other European Olympics participants.
According to Azerbaijani state news agency Azertag, this is a normal
procedure of a hosting country, and those countries that hosted
Olympic Games and other championships have done the same in the past
as well.

The price tag figures to be hefty. At least 50 countries have
confirmed their participation in the Games, and each is sending a
large team of athletes, coaches, media, assistants, relatives, etc.
Azerbaijan will spend in total more than 1.3 billion manats for the
games, which on average is about 2500 manats per each Azerbaijani
family. As for the revenues from the Games, state media has reported
that they are expected at 2.5 millions euros.

The government rationalizes that such a difference between the paltry
revenue and extraordinary spending is justified by “creating an
opportunity for the future of sports in Azerbaijan.”

Human rights concerns

Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch have appealed to the IOC
(International Olympic Committee) to discuss the human rights
situation in countries that host the games, and have noted that
Azerbaijan currently holds at least 100 political prisoners. “The IOC
is at a crucial moment to signal to would-be hosts that rights abuses,
corruption and repression have no place in the Olympic movement”,

Meanwhile, Azerbaijani president’s assistant on public-political
issues Ali Hasanov has said in a statement that such calls are part of
“a campaign against Azerbaijan.”

“Unfortunately, some local and foreign actors are trying to denigrate
the achievements of Azerbaijan in the economic, social, political,
humanitarian and other spheres, and to make the European game the main
theme of black PR against Azerbaijan. The call of Amnesty
International to boycott the games, the circulation of all those
prejudiced, biased materials in the media about the games, clearly
prove the existence of such attempts,” Hasanov said in his interview
to Azertag.

He also compared these efforts by the international community with a
“provocation” during the Eurovision-2012 song competition in Baku,
when human rights activists and watchdogs tried to attract more
attention to Azerbaijan’s poor human rights record.

Financial burden

“When this decision on financing of these games was made, the
government still did not know that soon it would face a national
currency crisis, and now it’s too just late to cancel the project,”
says president of the Center for Economic and Political Studies (FAR
CENTER) Hikmet Hajizadeh, adding that Azerbaijan could try to reduce
the costs of the games, but it had “neither the political will nor
rationalism for this step”.

When the government brought up the idea of hosting the European
Olympics, it was done in order to boost tourism and promote the PR
image of Azerbaijan, Hajizadeh says, adding that the games played an
opposite role – instead promoting Azerbaijan’s image, with over 100
political prisoners and multiple human rights violations, the games
became another reason to pay attention to the overall human rights
record.

According to Hajizadeh, the best thing the state could do is release
the political prisoners during the traditional annual March amnesty
for Novruz holiday.

However, Arastun Orujlu, the Head of the East-West Research Center,
says Azerbaijani government is, in a way, glad human rights groups are
bringing attention to the government’s poor record. According to him,
later after the games, when the country will experience all the
negative setbacks because of expenses of the games, the government
will attribute these difficulties to “foreign campaign against
Azerbaijan.”

Public reaction

Meanwhile, Azerbaijani citizens are angry that the games haven’t been cancelled.

“I work at an advertisement company, and our revenues fell with the
manat devaluation. Why do we need these games,” said Elmir, an
employee at an advertising company.

“They are even paying for the Armenian participants, and I still have
to rent a shack, this is unfair,” says Karabakh war veteran Asker
Sultanov.