By Ivan Gharibyan

Whatever we may say, official Baku has never been able to forgive the United States for launching the Armenia-Turkey normalization process and calling for normalization without any preconditions. Throughout the recent months the Azerbaijani authorities have been seeking occasions for attacks on the United States. The developments are perceived with even greater pain by the official Azeri propaganda.

Late last December all the central Azeri media outlets were indignant at the U.S.A. for its decision to provide essential financial aid to Nagorno-Karabakh. After the efforts failed, Baku began to look for “fresh food” for its worn-out propaganda machine and has found it – this time it is a regular report by the Freedom House, a Washington-based international non-governmental organization.

The point is that the report describes Azerbaijan as “not free,” while Armenia is “a partly free” country. It was enough for Baku to start telling “awful stories” about Freedom House being incompetent and biased. Well, the organization dared challenge Ilham Aliyev’s policy of constructing “democratic and prospering” Azerbaijan.

This time, the key role in “exposing” the U.S. human rights organization has been assigned to Elnur Aslanov, Head of the Political Analysis and Information Department, Azerbaijani Presidential Administration. He began telling tales about the Government’s concern for mass media and non-governmental organizations, without saying a single word about how this concern is shown in practice. Was Aslanov to tell about the Presidential Administration’s total control over all the TV channels, as it is practiced in such rogue states as Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan, or about the Azeri NGOs, which first of all swear their loyalty to the “national leader” Heydar Aliyev and his son Ilham? Aslanov also held back the truth about dozens of Azerbaijani journalists losing years in jails.

However, Azerbaijan’s campaign against Freedom House is absolutely pointless. One needs great imagination to accuse the organization of lobbying for Armenian interests — its distinctly negative appraisals of the Armenian authorities’ actions during the 2008 post-election period are still fresh in our mind. If the situation is even worse in Azerbaijan they had better try to improve it instead of going off into hysterics.

T.P.