The European Stability Initiative published the first part of the study entitled “Cavalry diplomacy: How Azerbaijan silenced the Council of Europe”, which details the chronology and mechanisms for bribing the members of the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe with the ruling regime of Azerbaijan.
The study, in particular, says that gift giving is a part of traditional Azeri culture, as well as the expectation that the generosity will be repaid one day. This is the logic of the policy, which Azerbaijani officials in private conversations call “caviar diplomacy”. It all began shortly after Azerbaijan joined the Council of Europe in 2001, and after the completion of the Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan oil pipeline in 2005, when petrodollars began to flow into the country’s treasury, the caviar policy was fully exploited.
Diplomacy is always about winning friends, building alliances, cutting deals, but in the case of Azerbaijan and the Council of Europe, everything went much further. As the Azerbaijani source in Strasbourg told the “European Stability Initiative” in 2011, Azerbaijan had a systematic policy of getting influence.
“One kilogram of caviar is worth between 1,300 and 1,400 euro. Each of our friends in PACE receives at every session, four times a year, at least 0.4 to 0.6 kg. Our key friends in PACE, who get this, are around 10 to 12 people. There are another 3 to 4 people in the secretariat. Caviar, at least, is given at every session. But during visits to Baku many other things are given as well. Many deputies are regularly invited to Azerbaijan and generously paid. In a normal year, at least 30 to 40 would be invited, some of them repeatedly. People are invited to conferences, events, sometimes for summer vacations. These are real vacations and there are many expensive gifts. Gifts are mostly expensive silk carpets, gold and silver items, drinks, caviar and money. In Baku, a common gift is 2 kg of caviar.”
Over the course of the project, the authors spoke to a large number of international officials, Azerbaijanis, members of PACE and people involved in election observation missions in Azerbaijan. We studied transcripts of Council of Europe debates on Azerbaijan and dissected election observation reports by international monitors. Outside of the Council of Europe, the state of Azerbaijan’s democracy is not seriously contested. Even its biggest admirers admit that it is at best a semi-authoritarian regime.
Azerbaijan has not held a single competitive election since Heydar Aliyev, the father of current president Ilham Aliyev, came to power in 1993, following a coup against the first elected president. The Central Election Commission, in charge of organising elections, has stacked the deck so firmly in favour of the incumbent government that no political competition is possible, fair or otherwise. In the parliamentary election of 2010, not a single opposition candidate managed to win a seat.
How, then, could the head of the PACE election observation mission declare that the elections had met international and Council of Europe standards? Why, when the human rights situation has steadily deteriorated since 2003, has debate in PACE on Azerbaijan become ever more anodyne, even complimentary?
There are many signs that corruption played a role in the rejection of PACE from its duties. The behavior of PACE, which is otherwise simply not clear, is well described by the “caviar policy” used by Azerbaijanis.
Azerbaijan was admitted to the Council of Europe with the idea that membership in the Council of Europe is gradually transforming Azerbaijan for the better, but the opposite happened, and this turned out to be a tragedy for the country’s citizens, especially for pro-democracy activists who languish in prisons as political prisoners. However, this is a tragedy for Europe, whose values were trampled, as PACE parliamentarians, who benefit from the “caviar politics” are members of the parliaments of European countries.
Источник: esiweb.org