Over the past 20 years, Azerbaijan has dropped several dozen positions in the press freedom ratings and occupies one of the last places there. Below are only countries like Eritrea and North Korea. Restrictive laws are being adopted in the country, some journalists ended up in jail, others fled the country, others remained and fit into the new rules of the game. The BBC tells their story.

“We were gradually losing ground, like that German pastor who said that when the communists were arrested, I was silent because I was not a communist,” recalls journalist Rauf Mirkadyrov, who spent two years in an Azerbaijani prison on charges of espionage. He has been living in Switzerland for six years now.

“This process [of pressure] continued gradually, and every segment of society justified itself,” he says. Then they came for the press and NGOs, and it turned out that there was simply no one to talk about us.”

On March 2, 2005, Elmar Huseynov, the editor of the popular Monitor magazine, was shot four times in the back in Azerbaijan.

This murder shocked society. The President called an emergency meeting of the Security Council and promised to find those responsible (they were not found).

In 2022, Azerbaijan adopted a law on the licensing of journalists by the state – there is no need to talk about any independent journalism after that. Only two dozen people came out to protest against the law, and they were immediately dispersed.

From the early 1990s until his arrest in 2014, Rauf Mirkadyrov worked for the popular Russian-language newspaper Zerkalo. He says that in the 1990s there was formal censorship, including coverage of the Karabakh war – for example, it was forbidden to show videos with reference to the location and generally criticize the state of the army on television. In general, the press already had economic freedom, and independent media paid off through circulation and advertising.

According to Azerbaijani journalists who worked in those years, the censors did not have a clearly defined task, among them there were evil and good, and somehow the bans were circumvented. When the censors nevertheless demanded that the text be removed from the newspapers, as a demarche, the publications came out with empty pages in place of the articles.

In 1998, President Heydar Aliyev (father of current President Ilham Aliyev) completely abolished censorship. “Azerbaijan then still believed that it was necessary to negotiate with the West, we tried to comply, to accept the rules of the game,” says Rauf Mirkadyrov.

In 2001, Azerbaijan became a member of the Council of Europe, offices of international structures, including the OSCE, worked in the country.

Mirkadyrov’s colleague Chingiz Sultansoy came to journalism in the perestroika year of 1988, to the magazine “Ganjlik” (“Youth”).

According to him, then he dreamed of becoming a writer, because those in the USSR “had the opportunity to touch on topics that journalists did not touch, hinted at, spoke in Aesopian language,” but the course towards publicity and freedom of speech that had begun convinced him to change his profession.

“At that time, not professional journalists became popular, they were like circus lions in the USSR, but people who came from other, often technical professions, for example, I was a mathematician,” he recalls.

Sultansoy says that in the early 2000s, he could not have imagined how quickly freedom of speech would be destroyed in the country.

In the early 2000s, the prestigious and influential newspapers “Zerkalo” and “Echo”, the “Turan” agency, the independent TV channel ANS, which were compared with the Georgian “Rustavi-2”, worked in Azerbaijan.

There were political talk shows with the participation of oppositionists on ANS, sharp reports were published, satirical poems were read here – this is an important part of Eastern culture. In disputes between ordinary people and civil servants, one could hear the threat: “I’ll call ANS now.”

“In the 1990s, journalists were not afraid that they would be killed,” says Sultansoy. “Me too. forty, but I felt young.”

Azerbaijani journalists admit that when you look at old magazines and newspapers, archives of TV channels, you can find critical materials that are unthinkable today.

Journalists polled by the BBC agree that freedom of speech has waned since Ilham Aliyev came to power in late 2003.

“At first he was busy strengthening his power, and when he dealt with the most pressing problems, he took up the press,” Chingiz Sultansoy believes.

As a result, in the Reporters Without Borders global media freedom ranking from 2003 to 2022, Azerbaijan dropped from 113th to 189th place, leaving only seven countries below itself in the list.

The milestone event that determined the future of the press in Azerbaijan, according to both Mirkadyrov and Sultansoy, was the high-profile murder on March 2, 2005 of Elmar Huseynov, editor of the popular Monitor magazine.

After that, every year journalists (at that time there were still hundreds) marched through the center of Baku demanding to find the killers and customers. Then these actions moved to the cemetery, to the grave of Huseynov, and then completely stopped.

“Then Elmar Huseynov was killed, the editor of the Bizim el newspaper Bakhaddin Gaziev was brutally beaten,” recalls Mirkadyrov. “It was a terrible period for us: on the one hand, you could write a lot – and a lot was written, but on the other hand, the press and society already lost.”

Since 2003, freedom of speech and freedom of assembly have been restricted in the country. The Zerkalo newspaper, where Mirkadyrov worked, lost advertising due to the monopolization of the advertising market, and a few years later it had to be closed.

“Then there was bribery of journalists, they were offered money, and those who did not want to negotiate were deprived of financial resources,” says Mirkadyrov.

In 2005, a lot of oil went from Azerbaijan to Europe. The country’s GDP grew by 27% over the year, which, according to President Aliyev, was “an unprecedented result in the world,” and continued to grow in subsequent years. New pro-government media began to appear, where journalists began to leave, and the staff of the independent Turan agency was reduced by almost 4 times due to lack of money.

In 2007, the editors of two popular newspapers, the Russian-language “Real Azerbaijan” and “Azadlyg” (“Freedom”), went to jail. Political programs disappeared from the ANS TV channel, and its journalists no longer filmed reports on sensitive topics. One of the channel’s founders, Mirshahin Agayev, soon became a well-known propagandist and one of the few local journalists interviewed by Ilham Aliyev.

Many (like, for example, the staff of the popular Russian-language magazine Monitor) simply left the profession. Someone reconciled and stayed to work, because they had no other specialty.

This happened to Adil (name changed at his request).

Just a few months after Ilham Aliyev came to power, the employees of the newspaper where he worked were gathered by the authorities. “The leadership announced that from now on the rules are changing,” he says. “There was a message in the media that now you can criticize the phenomena, but you can’t call ministers and officials by their names, and this was said very harshly.”

Then, at the beginning of 2004, he learned from colleagues that a similar distribution order came to other publications, but some “did not cave in, and then it had a negative effect on them.”

Today, Adil regrets his choice to stay in the profession, but says that he had nowhere to go, journalism is his only specialty.

“When it all started, the newsmakers, out of old habit, openly criticized, and we, out of old habit, frankly deciphered it, but when the material came out, I saw that this part of the text disappeared,” he recalls. us new conditions and frameworks”.

But gradually Adil developed new habits, turned only to more loyal experts, and they quickly learned what to say and what not.

“We all started playing this sad game,” he says.

In 2008, by presidential decree, the state Media Support Fund appeared in the country, headed by presidential aide Ali Hasanov, known for anti-Western rhetoric and the search for internal enemies.

This body distributed money annually to publications. Adil does not see this as a bribe or conflict of interest.

“It was in the amount of your average salary, they gave 100-200 manats (at that time 125-250 dollars), no one thought that this was a handout, rather it was such a small joy once a year,” he explains. certainty that this year they won’t give it, or the editor won’t squeeze it, so no one paid much attention to moral issues.

The apartments that since 2013, on National Press Day, have been given to journalists by the state have become much more joyful. We are talking about apartment buildings specially built for journalists.

Around the one who should get the living space, who really deserved it, debates flared up in the press more than once. And yes, Azerbaijan still has the title of “Honored Journalist”!

Azerbaijan also has an NPO State Support Agency, which was also created by presidential decree.

In 2014, the Azerbaijani authorities took a close look at non-governmental organizations. Then, during the summer, several of the most famous human rights activists ended up in prison on various charges.

“Back in the summer of 2014, I didn’t think about emigration, I thought that I would grow old here, this would be my last job,” recalls Chingiz Sultansoy, who was then the editor of the Russian-language version of the Azerbaijani Radio Liberty (in Russia it is recognized as a “foreign agent”).

Despite all the arrests, it seemed to him that his editorial staff would not be touched. But in December of that year, Khadija Ismail, a Svoboda journalist known for her high-profile investigative work, was arrested, and then the radio office itself was searched and sealed.

“When they came for me, I was at home, with a half-shaved face, and, maybe because of my age or my name, they allowed me to be nice and even have breakfast,” recalls Chingiz Sultansoy. “And there were those who were dragged out of the house even barefoot, to the cries and cries of children.

Many Svoboda journalists then left Azerbaijan, while Sultansoy, who escaped arrest, remained in the country for several more months.

“Friends and acquaintances asked me several times: “Are you still in Baku?”, “What are you waiting for? Arrest? Why?”, – the journalist says, – And suddenly I realized that I was not afraid of the arrest itself, beatings, torture. I was afraid to break down in prison, to go out different, subjugated, because I knew how they break it, they have 1001 ways to do it ” .

He recalls how employees of well-known publications changed their positions after prison. “I realized that if this happens to me, I don’t want to live broken,” he says. “At my age, it’s not even necessary to torture, you can simply not provide medical care – teeth, kidneys.”

He was afraid of being left without legal assistance, since by that time another practice had appeared – well-known lawyers who defended journalists and politicians were expelled from the country’s only Bar Association, and they no longer had the right to work.

Mirkadyrov was arrested in 2014. Then he lived in Turkey, he was deported from there to Azerbaijan and accused of espionage.

Today, in a conversation with the BBC, Mirkadyrov calls 2014 the year of the final death of the press.

“There is one that is under control, sometimes it is allowed to criticize someone, and a couple of opposition resources that have turned into some kind of battle sheets, whose texts consist of slogans,” he says. “This low quality arose from the fact that there is no money and personnel work is dangerous, and the remaining journalists do not see any prospects.”

BBC interlocutor Adil continued to work for pro-government sites, and he did not like this work. “I wrote only on international topics, and did not touch on domestic politics, because they scolded the opposition there, and I refused to do this,” he says. that, for example, Angela Merkel said something, and you have to answer – give all the bad things about Germany. You write this, and you write that.”

The internal agenda was tougher. For example, when criticizing the arrested spouses, human rights activists Leyla and Arif Yunus, it was necessary to write that Arif Yunus’s mother is an Armenian.

With the spread of social networks, new independent media outlets have gone to Facebook, which is very popular in Azerbaijan, which is difficult to shut down and now employs a new generation of reporters. These few journalists are often detained, banned from leaving the country, and attempts are made to hack into their social media profiles.

Some of them work as freelancers for foreign publications. And since the beginning of 2022, they have been in a vulnerable position, because the new media law effectively prohibits them from working with funding from abroad.

This law effectively equates journalists with civil servants, forcing them to provide the state with a long list of data about themselves in order to obtain a single journalist’s certificate for the whole country. Among the data are residential addresses, ID numbers and contacts of the founder, editor and all employees, contracts with journalists, their tax data, certificates of higher education and no criminal record.

Chingiz Sultansoy, in connection with this law, recalls a book as thick as a brick, which he found while working in a Soviet newspaper back in 1988. “It said that a journalist is a party worker who can write and follow the party line,” he says. “The new law is like this book, only worse.”

He has no doubt that he could stay in Azerbaijan, become a “defector”, and he has already been offered a job in a pro-government publication in a high position. “There are very rare people who have a special gift and write talentedly, convincingly, both truth and lies. But the vast majority must believe in what they write, otherwise the reader will not believe,” he says.

Adil, meanwhile, continues to work in local publications, he found a job that is not disgusting to him, but even here there is a ceiling of freedom. “I feel that there are restrictions and orders, when they say from above that something needs to be paid attention to and where one can criticize,” the journalist says. He suspects that the authorities have some kind of stepwise approach to the media: they order some, while others pretend to be a free press.

President Aliyev has repeatedly stated that there is no censorship in Azerbaijan.

In an interview with the BBC in 2020, he called the allegations of press harassment “fake”. “We have free media, we have free internet,” Aliyev said at the time.

He once again reminded that 80% of the population uses the Internet and millions are on Facebook.

“How can you say that we do not have free media? This is again a biased approach,” the president said. “This is an attempt to form a certain opinion about Azerbaijan among the Western audience. We have opposition, we have NGOs, we have free political activity “There are free media. There is freedom of speech.”

Rauf Mirkadyrov, in a conversation with the BBC, again and again recalls the well-known words of the German pastor Martin Niemoller about how everyone believed that they would not come for him.

“Everyone thought that he would be able to negotiate for himself, be able to bargain for his own island of security,” says the political emigrant. “And it was not like in Lithuania, where people fought under the slogan “For our and your freedom!” [This slogan is also has been used in Poland since the 19th century, and by Soviet dissidents who came out to Red Square in Moscow in 1968 to protest against the entry of troops into Czechoslovakia – BBC note].

He recalls how often people came to the Zerkalo newspaper, where he worked, complaining about the arbitrariness of officials and asking journalists to cover the problem.

One day one of them asked journalists not to give his name. “A person didn’t want to defend himself, and I thought why I should do it,” recalls Mirkadyrov. “Maybe we are individualists, maybe we haven’t learned to protect our rights collectively, we weren’t ready to fight for our and your freedom, and, finally, We waited until they came for us and there was no one to talk to.”