Chairman of “Musavat” (Equality), Arif Haijili, agreed to an interview with Radio Azadliq about the turn out of national support for the opposition.
Meydan TV offers the interview translated into English for the enjoyment of our readers below.
– Arif Bey, the referendum has come to an end, and with it, a period of oppositions – meetings. Why was there such a small turnout of citizens at Musavat’s party meetings, when just as few citizens turned out to vote in the country’s constitutional referendum? Of course, we remember times when in Baku, Zardabi Prospect, from January 20th square to Qelebe Circle was full of protesters.
If you diesregard the statements of the authorities, there are few conditions for the holding of meetings and protests in Azerbaijan. In Azerbaijan, there is no freedom of assembly, and people are allowed to gather and demonstrate only in one stadium of the city, and they need to have municipal authority to do so. The people are afraid. They have been frightened by waves of repression. People were arrested in the run up to the demonstrations, and they were taken to the police station afterwards, as well. Demonstrators were scared when they saw that all those flowing into the stadium were being filmed, and they were threatened with being fired from their work, and the livelihoods of their families and close ones. But people came to the demonstrations anyway. Our goal was not to fill the stadium and the streets, we wanted to broadcast and spread a message concerning the situation of the country. And we achieved that. I believe that the un-passing economic crisis will lead to a stand – off between the nation and the authorities, to the activation of the electorate, and people will begin more and more to come to demonstrations. The day is not far off when tens of thousands of citizens will come out onto the street, and protest and make themselves heard.
– Returning from the demonstrations I saw how a merchant in a shop was listening to a broadcast from the demonstration from a small loud-speaker at his workplace. He told me he was listening to the reportage live from Facebook. Obviously, one could consider participants of the demonstration not only those who were physically present.
At the September 18th Musavat party demonstrations there were more than 3,000 citizens present. There was also live radio – broadcasts enabled by Meydan TV, Radio Azadliq and other multimedia outlets and social networking sites. We were helped by youth groups such as N!DA Civic Movement, D18, Real, who joined forces with Musavat to help disseminate information about the referendum. They helped us gather signatures to present to the Central Election Commission. We highly appreciate the struggle of youth organizations for republican values and ideals. As a whole, we were heard by several dozens of thousands of people in Azerbaijan and abroad. The resolutions and demands of the demonstrations were spread throughout the world with the help of mass media and social networking sites. The outcome of our demonstration was that a formerly indifferent population was activated, and the people found out about the real intentions of the referendum, and largely boycotted it. Of course, we would have liked a little more activity from the people, but we achieved our aims.
– Foreign and international organizations differed on their political assessment of the referendum in Azerbaijan. The European People’s Party, the Observation Mission of the Council of Europe supported the referendum. In Baku they say that the American embassy urged Aliyev to add the changes to the constitution. Why?
I can’t agree with this idea about support for the referendum from America and Europe. On the eve of the 26th of September, I met diplomats in Baku and I know that rumors about the West’s alleged support for the referendum are far from true. Authoritative international organizations such as Freedom House and Amnesty International and the Venice Commission of the Council of Europe were categorically against the proposed amendments to the constitution. As concerns the not very large Observation Mission of the OSCE, its statement about the referendum was quickly criticized. They were unable to observe the entirety of the preparations for the September 26 referendum, because they arrived only several days before. It’s possible that the statement was coerced from them by the Azerbaijani government.
Musavat is the largest opposition political party in Azerbaijan. While the ruling party, “Yeni Azerbaijan” (New Azerbaijan) had survived for the past twenty years because of its administrative resources, Musavat has been actively functioning on the entire territory of Azerbaijan and has persevered thanks to its ideological foundation. In the last parliamentary elections of 2015, Musavat party put out more than 72 candidates in voting districts. Musavat has headquarters in all regions of Azerbaijan. Other parties work solely out of the capital and in other large cities of Azerbaijan.
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This article originally appeared in
Russian on Radio Azadliq.
