Religious freedom concerns voiced over Azerbaijan

(RNS)—Azerbaijan, which hosted a United Nations climate summit last month, has come under international scrutiny for human rights and religious freedom violations.

Days before the climate summit, the Azerbaijani government held a summit of religious leaders working on climate issues, calling itself “well-known for its traditions of tolerance, multicultural values and inter-civilizational and inter-religious cooperation.

However, outside observers repeatedly have raised concerns about religious freedom in the former Soviet country.

The government, led by President Ilham Aliyev, part of a family that has led the Muslim-majority country since 1993, requires religious groups to register with the government to operate legally.

In the last two years, the number of religious activists who are being held as political prisoners has increased sharply, according to Azerbaijani watchdog Institute for Peace and Democracy, part of a broader escalation of a campaign of repression that also has led to the arrests of journalists and other opposition figures.

The country has strengthened its army and recently carried out what the European Parliament called an “ethnic cleansing” of the breakaway region of Nagorno-Karabakh. Though internationally recognized as part of Azerbaijan, Nagorno-Karabakh had been governed by ethnic Armenians since the fall of the Soviet Union.

Treatment of ethnic Armenians

Armenians, who trace their heritage to the establishment of the oldest Christian nation, have called attention to Azerbaijani destruction of their religious sites in the region, even as the Azerbaijani government has said Armenians have destroyed Azerbaijani religious sites.

These concerns helped Azerbaijan land on the U.S. Commission of International Religious Freedom’s 2024 “countries of particular concern” list, its designation for governments that engage in or tolerate “particularly severe” violations of religious freedom.

“When something is happening to the first Christian nation in the world, they don’t care,” said Arshak Makichyan, an ethnic Armenian Apostolic Christian and climate activist who lost his Russian citizenship after speaking out against the war in Ukraine.

“What is happening to Armenians is really terrible, and we need international solidarity,” he said, warning he worries Azerbaijan will be emboldened to go to war with Armenia.

The activist sees Armenian issues as a natural part of the COP discussion of Indigenous issues.

“If you have been colonized by Western countries, then it is colonization, but if you were colonized by Turkey or Azerbaijan, then it’s not colonization,” he said of Western people’s ignorance of Armenian history. That history included centuries of Ottoman control and repression before somewhere between 600,000 and 1.5 million Armenians were killed by the Ottoman Empire during World War I, in what widely is considered a genocide.

Makichyan explained he thought it was really important to raise the Armenian issue at the conference.

He is part of a group calling for the international community who attended the climate summit to demand the release of Armenian and other political prisoners held by the Azerbaijani government.

The group also is calling for sanctions, the right of return for “Artsakh Armenians to Indigenous lands,” an end to anti-Armenian destruction of cultural heritage and propaganda and divestment from Azerbaijani oil, in addition to a commitment to cease holding the climate change summit in countries with political prisoners.

Azerbaijan has dismissed international concerns about religious freedom in the country as holding pro-Armenian bias.

Kamal Gasimov, a researcher on Islam in Azerbaijan and visiting assistant professor of Arabic at Swarthmore College in Pennsylvania, said the USCIRF report should have cited third-party sources instead of relying on Armenian scholars to write about Armenian monuments.

Gasimov said the USCIRF report is a “political document,” which is indicative of relationships between Azerbaijan and the United States. Some Azeris see the document as evidence of U.S. imperialism, while others whose family members are imprisoned are grateful for it, he said.

Mohamed Elsanousi, a commissioner who joined USCIRF after the most recent report’s deliberation process had been completed, said: “Our aim here is not really to blame and shame countries. Our aim is to improve religious freedom.”

USCIRF is made up of appointees by the U.S. president and congressional leaders. A minority of four dissented the Azerbaijan decision, expressing concerns the country should be given a less severe designation for its religious freedom violations.

Politics motivate religious controls

Despite controversy over the report, Gasimov said the Azerbaijani government plays a significant role regulating religion in the Muslim-majority country, adapting an approach from the Soviet Union that is common across post-Soviet countries.

“If you are a registered religious community within the state institution, the state gives you a passport, then you exist. If the state refuses your registration, then you don’t exist,” he said.

The goal is “making Islam part of the state bureaucracy, which makes Islam predictable,” as well as “easily observed” and “controlled.” They also accomplish this by “controlling books” and “trying to co-opt the religious leaders, charismatic leaders, (by) offering them jobs in the government.”

Other religious groups, like the Jehovah’s Witnesses, have not been able to register. Jehovah’s Witnesses also highlight the state has not followed through on its stated exemptions to compulsory military service for conscientious objectors, with some believers experiencing beatings and legal sentences.

USCIRF cites the 2009 Azerbaijani law requiring registration as a major source of the violation of international human rights standards. However, Gasimov said the Arab Spring protests motivated the government to double down on control in the name of preventing radicalization and legitimized those actions by juxtaposing “the security of Azerbaijan with what’s happening in the Middle East.”

Azerbaijani watchdog Institute for Peace and Democracy says the majority of the 319 political prisoners in the Muslim-majority country are “peaceful believers.” Those 228 prisoners include members of the Muslim Unity Movement and other Muslim theologians. Before early 2023, the number of religious political prisoners had been below 100.

Makichyan said Azerbaijan previously has used “greenwashing,” or a type of spin that portrays the country as an environmental protector, to get away with human rights violations, including against ethnic Armenians.

Looking forward, he emphasized the importance of religious pluralism. As a Christian who knows of genocides that Muslim Indigenous groups have lived through, “it’s really important to be against Islamophobia, because we Armenians, hopefully, we will be able to return to western Armenia also and try to coexist with other people,” he said.