Khadija Ismayilova worked tirelessly to expose corruption in Azerbaijan’s president’s family and assist activists who came under fire. Now she’s in jail with them.
The jailing of Azerbaijan’s leading investigative journalist has rights activists and observers worried the country is intent on stamping out all dissent whatsoever.
Radio Free Europe / Radio Liberty
A court in Azerbaijan's capital, Baku, ordered Radio Free Liberty reporter Khadija Ismayilova (pictured above left) to spend two months in pretrial detention on Friday for allegedly nearly driving her boyfriend to suicide.
Her supporters say that the government cooked up the charges to muzzle the media in retribution for her work, which has seen her expose murky business dealings of the president's family while tirelessly supporting Azerbaijan's under-fire community of rights activists.
Ismayilova's jailing may be the nail in the coffin for this small, mostly Muslim post-Soviet country's civil society movement, which has been driven underground this year by a wave of repressive laws and arrests on spurious charges. Fifteen independent journalists are currently behind bars, while a list of political prisoners stretches to nearly a hundred — including the respected activists who compiled it. With Ismayilova now among them, her supporters fear that critical reporting and activism may simply die out.
"Khadija had really taken on the work of everyone else. Now she's in jail, there's really nobody else," Rebecca Vincent, a human rights activist and former U.S. diplomat in Baku, told BuzzFeed News. "Most have been arrested, one is in hiding, several have fled, and the others have just shut down."
Ismayilova, 38, came to prominence in 2010, when she published the first in a series of articles about how President Ilham Aliyev’s daughters got rich through seemingly exploiting their close ties to the government.
Radio Free Europe / Radio Liberty
The articles caused a sensation in Azerbaijan, which has splashed its petrodollars on a sophisticated Western lobbying campaign to portray it as a squeaky-clean emerging democracy despite Aliyev's firm grip on power. By 2012, Azerbaijan's parliament changed its laws to make company ownership records confidential — a move many saw as a direct response to Ismayilova's reporting.
Retribution came that same year, when she was sent a letter with stills from a video of her having sex with her boyfriend on a hidden camera installed in her apartment. After she refused to back down on her reporting, the video was posted online.
Rather than deter Ismayilova, however, the pressure spurred her to take on even more advocacy work. She became a point person for raising awareness of human rights issues to foreign NGOs, governments, and reporters. When reporters and activists fell into legal trouble on apparently politically motivated charges, she took charge of funds for their defense and to support their families. Harassment and the threat of arrest only seemed to spur her on further, even prompting her to issue defiant instructions to her friends about what to do if she were jailed.
"The tragedy is, when I heard the news that Khadija is jailed, I was relieved, because I was expecting all this time that they would kill her," Emin Milli, who runs an independent Azerbaijani online news channel from self-imposed exile in Berlin, told BuzzFeed News.
Over time, the pressure on Ismayilova increased. Prosecutors brought a criminal defamation case against her for posting a government document revealing apparent plans to spy on the opposition. Police accused her of passing on state secrets to congressional staffers she met earlier this year. After she returned to Baku from briefing the European Parliament on Azerbaijan's deteriorating corruption and human rights record in October, officials interrogated her for hours, then banned her from leaving the country.
Eventually, Ismayilova learned that the ban was due to criminal charges brought against her for allegedly driving Tural Mustafayev, a former colleague whom she recently dated, to suicide. Mustafayev, who Izmayilova's friends say has a history of mental problems, failed to go through with his attempt and made a statement to psychologists that prosecutors used as evidence against her.
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