The Azerbaijani campaign of the Lachin Corridor is not spontaneous, the people blocking it are not environmentalists. The international press, representatives of various media, public figures and officials, as well as Azerbaijanis, are speaking about this after December 12.
Who are the Azerbaijanis blocking the Lachin Corridor? ‘Lurer’ conducted a study and found out - those blocking the corridor of Lachin come and go with a list. And the scheme is simple.
The campaign to close the corridor is coordinated by the State Support Agency of Azerbaijan's non-governmental organizations, whose activities are coordinated by the Control Council of Azerbaijan. There are 11 members of the Council, all of them are appointed by the President of Azerbaijan.
It is noteworthy that this agency was established in 2021 by the decree of the President of Azerbaijan, and in Azerbaijan, the Government actually funds NGOs.
The process of coverage and distribution of the campaign is also coordinated from the top by the Media Development Agency of Azerbaijan and the Press Council of Azerbaijan.
And, for example, the independent journalists who did not serve the interests of the Aliyev clan, who managed to reach Lachin Corridor on December 14, were kidnapped by masked persons.
Later, the press secretary of the Azerbaijani police, Elshad Hajiyev, wrote in the comments on the Facebook post of one of the arrested journalists, Khayala Aghaeva, that the journalists were removed from the scene of the incident because they did not have permission to be there.
In the video of an environmentalist woman who, engrossed in her speech, strangled the pigeon she was holding in her hand, the Azerbaijani media covered that part edited, whereas the full video was shared on the Internet.
Then they would look for the person who filmed and distributed the video of the pigeon drowned by the hands of the environmentalist in Azerbaijan. Azerbaijani Javid Garan, one of the exceptional environmentalists of Azerbaijan, who, for example, in the summer of 2021, held a protest in Baku against the continuous cutting of forests, and who was not in the Lachin Corridor for a single day, informs about this on the social platform.
And who are there? You won't find ladies in fur-coats have already become famous in early December any more. It turns out that there are many environmentalists in Azerbaijan and they change often. And their shifts are coordinated by the Union of Voluntary Organizations of Azerbaijan.
The list is conventionally divided into 6 groups, 139 NGOs, 43 youth initiatives, 13 individual volunteers, 9 public council organizations, 4 parties are included as non-state organizations. It is interesting that one of those 4 parties is the ruling ‘New Azerbaijan’, and the state committee working with religious institutions is included in that list from the state sector.
By the way, those lists contain information about 507 so-called ‘activists’: names, positions, relations with state-public institutions, as well as two or three personal photos of them. It turns out that most of them are not environmentalists, but journalists and members of non-governmental organizations, professors and students of Baku State University.
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Toghrul Mammadli, Head of Department of Council of State Support for Non-Governmental Organizations under the President of the Republic of Azerbaijan
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Elmeddin Muradli, Editor-in-Chief of Avtosfer.az, Public Council under the Ministry of Internal Affairs of the Republic of Azerbaijan
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Taleh Sahsuvarov, Chief editor of AzNews.az, Member of the Public Council under the Ministry of Internal Affairs of the Republic of Azerbaijan
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Khalid Kazimov, Journalist, Chairman of the Regional Center for Human Rights and Media
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Rovshan Hamidli, Project Manager at the Agency for State Support of Non-Governmental Organizations, Leading Advisor to the Council of State Support for Non-Governmental Organizations under the President of the Republic of Azerbaijan
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Konul Quliyeva, State Support Agency for Non-Governmental Organizations of the Republic of Azerbaijan, Chairwoman of the public association 'For the future of children'.
And such are hundreds. By the way, the Azerbaijani service of the BBC found out in December that among the participants of the campaign there are even employees of Turkish companies.
The interesting thing is that after 2020, a special permit is needed to visit the territories under the control of Azerbaijan, and the visit is organized by buses provided by the state. Moreover, during these 3 years, citizens who traveled to these areas without permission were arrested.
