Twitter hashtag war unfolds between Azerbaijani authorities and international human rights campaigners
The European Games kicked off in Baku, capital of Azerbaijan, on Friday. But the hashtag #Baku2015 has been used by human rights campaigners to voice protest against the human rights situation in Azerbaijan, BBC Trending writes.
The hashtag has been tweeted nearly 100,000 times in the last month. Amidst athlete interviews and pictures of the new stadium in Baku, a significant number of the most repeated messages are from activists and groups such as Human Rights Watch, PEN and Amnesty International. They're using the tag to write about something very different: the arrests of journalists and the arbitrary detention of activists. Other hashtags include #EuropeanGames and #RealBaku that have been tweeted thousands of times by activists, according to BBC Trending.
BBC also noticed the government supporters’ online vocal attempts to wrest the hashtag back to a discussion about sport. At several points in the run-up to the games, pro-government messages hit Twitter from multiple accounts at roughly the same time and tweeted positive photos of Baku. Arzu Geybulla, an independent Azerbaijani journalist based in Istanbul, says this pattern is consistent with the way politics works online in the country. The youth branch of the ruling New Azerbaijan political party deploys a number of young people online who call themselves journalists, she says, but actually spread partisan messages.
Agence France-Presse reports the days leading up to the opening ceremony of the Games have done little to placate the critics of the host nation's record with Amnesty International being barred from entering the country and the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) ordered to shut down its Baku office.
In Brussels, Equal Times met with the daughter of two leading Azerbaijani human rights activists, Arif Yunus and Leyla Yunus, who have been in prison awaiting trial since 2014. Living in exile in the Netherlands, Dinara has not been back to Azerbaijan for five years, as the government “habitually uses family members to put pressure on prisoners”; she has no direct contact with her parents. She is convinced that the systematic extension of her mother’s detention shows that the government is determined to kill her behind bars.
“I am appealing to governments to publicly denounce the abuses and I expect the French government to take the initiative, because my mum is a Knight of the Legion of Honour. I don’t know what they [the governments] are doing but it isn’t working,” she said. Dinara says she has the feeling that her parents have been abandoned and it will not be much longer before she hears that one of them has died, given the state of their health.
Ulrike Lunacek, the vice president of the European Parliament, said if Europe reduced its dependence on Azerbaijani gas, the governments would be freer to denounce the abuses in that country, according to Equal Times.
“Azerbaijan defiles the spirit of the Olympic Charter by jailing journalists and human rights defenders and depriving the civil society of air. As the international reaction regards, I would say these problems have not been voiced so far. Currently, Azerbaijan is experiencing one of the worst human rights crises since gaining independence,” Giorgi Gogia from Human Rights watch told the Russian service of Deutsche Welle.
On 12-28 June, Baku will host the first European Games under the auspices of the European Olympic Committee. According to media estimates, the Games will cost the Azerbaijani population $10 billion. However, they have become a serious headache for the locals with numerous bans and demolition of property. The preparatory works for the Games are accompanied by crackdowns and brutal repressions against dissent.
Related:
British journalist is deported from Baku and Amnesty International is denied entry to Azerbaijan
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