The secret trial of Baku youth activists
By Karl Rahder in Baku for ISN Security Watch (24/04/06)
Azerbaijan's serious crimes court has been the scene of one of the most anticipated trials in years, with three activists from the Yeni Fekir (New Idea) youth movement charged with plotting to violently overthrow the government of Azerbaijan. While the prosecutor’s office has alleged that one of the defendants accepted money from Armenian secret agents to fund a revolution, the defense team has painted the affair as a crude attempt to undermine and even dismantle the political opposition in this former Soviet republic on the Caspian Sea.
In addition to a sensational videotape, the prosecution is relying heavily on testimony from two witnesses, one of whom the government says participated in bribing Ruslan Bashirli - the head of Yeni Fekir - with US$2,000 in cash and a promise of an additional US$20,000 to incite a violent revolution coinciding with last November’s controversial parliamentary elections.
Among the evidence - of the type found in a pulp spy novel - is a videotape surreptitiously recorded in a flat in Tbilisi, Georgia, which may show Bashirli accepting the down payment and agreeing to incite a revolt in the Azerbaijani capital, Baku, an incriminating receipt, supposedly spiked drinks, and the arrest of a conspirator on the Georgian-Azeri border.
The trial, being held in secret, is widely seen as a crucial test of the Azerbaijani government’s commitment to the rule of law, human rights, and government transparency. Coming on the heels of the November parliamentary election period, which saw the arrests of government ministers and other public figures on charges of sedition, the trial of Ruslan Bashirli, Said Nuri, and Ramin Tagiev has implications that go far beyond the fate of three pro-democracy activists and their group.
While having no formal tie to the Azadlig (Freedom) Bloc of opposition parties, Yeni Fekir has a close relationship with Azadlig, and helped spearhead the failed attempt to ignite a “color revolution” in Azerbaijan, an oil-rich US ally, last autumn.
International implications
In a series of exclusive interviews over a period of several months, the defense team and defendant Said Nuri have given ISN Security Watch unique access to defense strategy and developments in the case. As of press time, the Azerbaijan Prosecutor General’s Office explained that prosecutors would not be available to discuss the trial since it was being held in secret.
Bashirli’s former lawyer, Elchin Gambarov, who now represents Nuri and Tagiev, has charged that his client was offered freedom by law enforcement officials if he agreed to implicate Ali Keremli, leader of the Popular Front Party, the most powerful of the parties that make up Azadlig. Bashirli refused the offer and has remained imprisoned since early August, most recently in a prison hospital due to ill health, says his current lawyer, Osman Kazimov.
Like Bashirli and Tagiev, Said Nuri, a 24-year-old university graduate, is charged with fomenting violent revolution, along with accepting US$50,000, most of which was supplied by a “foreign embassy based in Baku”, according to Azerbaijani prosecutors. Both Nuri and Kazimov have said that the “foreign embassy” the government will name is Norway, whose ambassador, Steiner Gil, is a frequent critic of Azerbaijan’s human rights record.
Apart from the Norwegian embassy, another bête noire of the government here is the National Democratic Institute (NDI), a non-profit institute funded by the US Congress for the furtherance of democratic development and chaired by former US secretary of state Madeleine Albright. In the video, Bashirli is said to have told the Armenian agents that he was acting on orders from the NDI to overthrow the Azerbaijani government.
And while Bashirli was in Tbilisi being videotaped, Nuri was on his way to Poland, where he attended a conference during which he received instructions on his role in the coup d’etat, says the prosecutor’s office. The conference was sponsored by the NDI, which has denied any involvement in the alleged plot.
Bashirli had arrived in the Georgian capital, Tbilisi, in late July to attend a conference called “Democracy Without Borders”. Accompanied by Yeni Fekir member Osman Alimuradov, Bashirli is said by the prosecutor’s office to have been invited on the evening of 28 July to a Tbilisi apartment by three men: a Georgian named Merab Jibuti, and two Armenian intelligence agents - a man named Georgi Ispiryan and a mysterious figure who has been identified only as “Vardan” in press reports.
In the videotape allegedly secretly recorded at the apartment, Bashirli not only allegedly agreed to cooperate in an Armenian-engineered coup, but signed a receipt for the US$2,000 down payment.
According to numerous press reports, Bashirli boasted during the videotaped encounter about his close relationship to both the NDI and Keremli. Ispiryan apparently proposed having conspirators fire into crowds at demonstrations in Azerbaijan and arranging provocations at the Nagorno-Karabakh “Line of Control” - the heavily fortified no-man’s land between Armenia and Azerbaijan.
That night, Alimuradov is said to have agonized with the Armenians and Jibuti over Bashirli’s acceptance of the money, and the next day attempted to convince Bashirli to return the payment. But by this time, the Armenians had threatened to blackmail the pair and had given a copy of the compromising video to Alimuradov.
This version of events has been challenged by Kazimov and co-counsel Gambarov, who was quoted in August as saying that "no intelligence service in the world would hand over a videocassette with compromising footage to someone whom it was seeking to co-opt".
The lawyers also maintain that the “Armenian” Georgi Ispiryan, who apparently is seen on the videotape paying Bashirli, is in fact a Georgian by the name of George Burjanadze, whom Kazimov claims is related to Georgian Speaker of Parliament Nino Burjanadze. By press time, the Georgian government had not responded to a request from ISN Security Watch for confirmation.
In a bizarre twist, Jibuti was arrested by Azerbaijani border officials as he allegedly attempted to enter the country from Georgia on 30 August. After a brief imprisonment, he was released and repatriated to Georgia, although his name was on a witness list supplied to ISN Security Watch and he reportedly testified in court earlier this month. Kazimov has repeatedly asked why, when his client was arrested for sedition, Jibuti was never charged.
Explosive charges
Bashirli’s friends and family, including Nuri, acknowledge that he appears to make incriminating statements on the videotape regarding his relationship with the NDI as well as his willingness to accept the compromising payment. “But he was drunk and bragging,” says Nuri, who suspects that Bashirli’s drinks in Tbilisi were spiked.
The purported involvement of the Armenian intelligence service is particularly explosive given that Azerbaijan is still in a technical state of war with Armenia over Nagorno-Karabakh. This connection has been highlighted by the government in order to convey Yeni Fekir, and by implication the Popular Front Party, as ethically bankrupt opportunists who will stop at nothing in order to sow disorder and overturn the elected government.
The case is being watched by a variety of human rights groups as well as the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) and the US Department of State, whose observers were not admitted to the secret proceedings on 5 April.
Despite critical public statements on the arrests from the international community and the subsequent incarceration of Bashirli and Tagiev, the prosecutor’s office requested on the opening day of the trial on 31 March that the remainder be held in secret in order to “protect the prosecution witnesses” - a motion granted by the chief of the three-judge panel. There are no jury trials in Azerbaijan.
The OSCE Baku office responded by expressing regret over the secrecy surrounding the trial: “The court's ruling, which effectively makes the whole trial a state secret, is regrettable and does nothing to enhance public trust in the judiciary," said Ambassador Maurizio Pavesi. "It makes it impossible for the OSCE monitors to assess the fairness of the proceedings and their compliance with international standards."
In the wake of the court’s ruling, the defense team has adopted a new tactic: non-participation. “We released our lawyers,” said Nuri, “and will not participate any further.”
When Alimuradov began his testimony during the trial’s second week, “as a protest we stood up and sang the Azerbaijani national anthem”, according to Nuri, who is the only one of the three defendants who has not been incarcerated pending the trial’s outcome.
The most eagerly awaited piece of evidence in the entire trial is the disputed videotape, seemingly the key to convicting Bashirli. Defense attorney Kazimov says he has had no opportunity to view or submit the tape to independent experts for analysis: “I proposed to the court to have experts examine the tape with the involvement of the defense team, but the court did not agree [...] We officially addressed all the television stations in order to view the tape. We wanted to do this at the TV stations, face to face with both us and the prosecutors present. But they refused.”
Repeated requests in the last several weeks by ISN Security Watch to view and examine archived news broadcasts of the video at television stations including Lider TV, a pro-government television broadcaster, have so far been rebuffed.
But in a stunning development, the prosecution team announced on 13 April that it had lost the video, according to Nuri, who has been ordered by the chief judge not to apprise the media of courtroom developments on pain of re-arrest.
New lawyers have been appointed by the court to replace Kazimov and Gambarov, but “in any case, we will not participate”, says Nuri, who expects a verdict in the coming week.
His eventual imprisonment is almost a foregone conclusion, he says. “It’s not a tragedy - it’s reality.”
Karl Rahder has taught US foreign policy and international history at colleges and universities in the US and Azerbaijan. In 2004, he was a Visiting Faculty Fellow in Azerbaijan with the Civic Education Project, an academic program funded by the Soros Foundations and the US Department of State. He is currently based in Baku