Last week, Elina Valtonen, the OSCE Chair-in-office and Finnish Foreign Minister, attended a demonstration in central Tbilisi as a show of support for the long-running protest movement against the Georgian Dream government’s anti-Western trajectory.
While not the first EU diplomat to have attended a protest in Tbilisi, her attendance drove the government to say that it had cancelled her meeting with Prime Minister Irakli Kobakhidze — or so it seemed.
Valtonen quickly hit back, saying that she was the one who cancelled the meeting, citing changes to her schedule.
The following day, she was fined ₾5,000 ($1,800) for allegedly blocking the road during a protest — a charge the government is now very liberally using to throw regular protesters behind bars.
If anything, I would say that this ultimately spoke well of Valtonen, who, in a way, shed more light on Georgian Dream’s vicious, vitriolic, and petty anti-Western attitude. Her being amongst the protesters in Tbilisi proved that she understands the havoc an authoritarian government can wreak on civil society, media, and everyday people concerned about the state of their country.
Valtonen proved that she is fully capable of speaking out against authoritarianism in Georgia — so why is she voluntarily helping to whitewash Azerbaijan?
On Wednesday, Valtonen posted on social media about meetings she held with Azerbaijani civil society members and journalists, whose work she said was the ‘lifeblood of democratic resilience’. The meeting was held remotely, a week after her actual visit to Azerbaijan — again due to scheduling issues.
While Valtonen has not specified whom she spoke with, I will give her the benefit of the doubt; maybe she did actually get a chance to talk to journalists from newsrooms much of whose teams are currently in jail in Azerbaijan.
But nowhere (at least not since her visit) did she endeavour to make any public statements condemning the Aliyev regime’s relentless crusade against civil society and independent media.
On Tuesday, we published an article about Bahruz Samadov’s worsening state in Azerbaijan’s prison system. Samadov, who is a promising scholar and was a regular OC Media contributor, was sentenced to 15 years in prison on charges of treason based on his invaluable work dissecting authoritarianism in Azerbaijan and making peace with Armenia. This week, he has again threatened suicide due to the treatment he has been receiving in prison.
A bevy of journalists from Meydan TV, Toplum TV, and Abzas Media are also in pre-trial detention or serving lengthy sentences on charges of smuggling foreign currency into Azerbaijan. Their organisations, as well as OC Media, have been regularly reporting on their conditions, often basing this reporting on letters describing the horrendous treatment all inmates receive at the hands of prison guards in Azerbaijan.
Azerbaijan’s prisons also have no shortage of pro-democracy and labour activists clearly jailed for their work.
The Aliyev regime is not a friend to the West, no matter how much petrol it pumps into Europe. It is no less vicious than the Georgian Dream government, haphazardly jailing and tormenting critics while casually belittling, insulting, and mocking Europe.
EU officials like Valtonen need to understand that. They need to do more and do better; they need to stop selectively ignoring crimes committed by authoritarian regimes, lest they start doing the same in Georgia or God knows where else.
