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Over the past year and a half, the government of Azerbaijan has taken an increasingly nasty, authoritarian, and anti-Western character, writes Thomas de Waal, the senior associate for the Caucasus at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in the article titled “A free-thinker loses his freedom in Azerbaijan” which is dedicated to the Azerbaijani scientist Arif Yunus. The latter celebrates his 60th birthday in prison. The article is published on the Open Democracy site.

“Along with Arif and Leyla Yunus, several other well-respected scholars, journalists, lawyers, and human rights activists, have been put in jail on spurious charges. In the vocabulary of the Soviet Union, all of these people can be characterised as dissidents,” Thomas de Waal writes and recalls that on August last year after the house arrest Arif Yunus was kept in an isolation cell in the prison of the National Security Agency, the successor to the KGB. He is unable to receive visits or letters.

He is also one of the few Azerbaijanis who actually went to Armenia. Like many other natives of Baku, Yunus had an Armenian mother, but unlike most he chose not to hide it.

“The charge of collaboration with the Armenians levelled against Arif and Leyla Yunus is probably just a pretext, a way of blackening their names in the eyes of the public. The Armenian card is also being played against Rauf Mirkadirov, a well-known journalist and columnist, who was arrested last April on similar charges after making one visit to Armenia. The main reason for their arrests is probably Leyla Yunus’ human rights work,” notes de Waal.

In his article he presents Arif Yunus’ scientific and journalistic activities, as well as turns to the unpublished collection of first-person stories and anecdotes. He tells, for example, the tale of the traffic policeman outside the town of Shemakhi who retired but still parked his car in his customary spot by the roadside and took bribes from passing motorists — who moreover gave them quite willingly. The collection also presents a story of how President Heidar Aliyev was given a library card to the new US library in Baku by then American ambassador Richard Kauzlarich. Arif understood both sides of the story: Kauzlarich who believed he was making a nice gesture, Aliyev who was offended that he was being treated as though he was any other citizen of Azerbaijan.

According to de Waal this irreverent and affectionate vision of the real Caucasus does not fit with the scrubbed marble-clad Dubai lookalike that the Azerbaijani authorities are trying to make of their country, with international events like the Eurovision Song Context or European Olympics.

“Azerbaijan’s leaders evidently believe that this virtual reality must be defended from all questioning and scrutiny. That is the main reason that they have now shut down the major source of independent news, the US-funded radio station, Radio Liberty,” notes Thomas de Waal.