Forbes staff writer Kashmir Hill in her recent article on Forbes entitled “Think The State Of Privacy Is Bad Here? Take A Trip To Baku, Azerbaijan.” Tells about her trip to Baku, Azerbaijan. She was invited by the International Press Institute inviting me to speak on a panel at an oil and gas conference.
Important to note that the writer even before leaving the country was preparing for the possibility of the panel not to be real and she was afraid of the “identity stealing”.
Hill writes, “Many of the journalists noted the irony in a press freedom group holding an event in Azerbaijan, a country that is not heralded for giving free reign to the Fourth Estate. In the months before the conference, journalists covering a protest of Socar, Azerbaijan’s oil company were attacked by Socar guards – with one beaten so severely that he was hospitalized. Other journalists have been jailed for reporting corruption and questioning government narratives. There was a panel on press freedom during the conference, but to the dismay of some of the conference attendees, it included no Azerbaijani journalists.”
The writer goes on discussing Azerbaijan’s self-promotion strategy which included the Eurovision contest, this oil/gas/press freedom conference, an Internet governance and freedom conference, and several concerts. “It’s certainly a deliberate attempt to promote the country, even if the state of press and Internet freedom remain a topic of heated debate. You won’t waste an hour watching this Swedish documentary on the monitoring of cellular communications there. The filmmakers interviewed one Azerbaijani citizen who said he was questioned by police after he voted for an Armenian band instead of his country’s own in the European version of American Idol. They knew this because they had been monitoring his phone activity and had captured the text message he sent registering his vote for the band from the nemesis country.”
During the lunch time Hill talked to a diplomat stationed in Baku who mentioned to her the case of Khadija Ismayilova, a female Azerbaijani journalist who had been subjected to a repression tactic born of the modern viral age.
In March, after reporting for years on the illegal privatization of state resources by members of the presidential family – including a telecom company that appears to be secretly owned by the president’s daughter — Ismayilova got a package. It contained a note — “Whore, behave. Or you will be defamed.” – and intimate photos of her and her boyfriend that had been taken without her knowledge. She discovered the photos had also been sent to newspapers. The reporter wasn’t scared. She wrote about the threat on Facebook and later found her sex tape of her and her boyfriend online.” Her attackers assumed the release would discredit her. “Azerbaijan is a very conservative country with strict attitudes toward woman. Women having sexual relations outside of marriage is not acceptable.”
Ismayilova found that the tape was made via the cameras stationed in her room including her bathroom. Different journalists told Hill that they were aware of the dangers in Azerbaijan. “There is a society that expects to be watched.”
Kashmir Hill concludes her article, ” Katya Soldak, a Forbes contributor who speaks Russian, reached out to Azerbaijan’s state prosecutors on my behalf, asking about the investigation into Ismayilova’s trespassing, harassment and invasion of privacy case.
“Based on the complaint from Khadiji Ismaylova [sic] on invasion of privacy the criminal case was opened by the Office of the General Prosecutor in Baku. The necessary investigation has been conducted — including witnesses’ testimony, collecting the evidence, and submitting expert finding to appropriate departments; assignments have been given to specific agencies, requests have been made, and tasks are given to evidence response team,” spokesman Eldar Sultanov responded by email. “At the present moment the efforts to make full and objective investigation continue.”
I can’t say that sounds promising.
***I know that we increasingly live in a world in which our every moment in public is potentially filmed, meaning you have to constantly be on your guard. In Baku, I got a sense of what it would be like to fear that every intimate moment could be potentially filmed as well. Steffens’ rule of thumb about “not doing anything too wacky in a hotel room in a country like that” is good advice. But what if you live in a country like that? What if your government behaves like a malicious ex-boyfriend?
So that was my trip to Baku. I’m keeping my fingers crossed that footage of me wandering around my hotel room in a state of undress doesn’t wind up on the Internet as a souvenir from my trip.”
