Abstract
When I think about freedom of expression, I inevitably think about prison life in Azerbaijan. Prison is a very quiet place, unless the silence is disturbed by the screams of tortured prisoners or voices of guards demanding bribes. It is a place with its own traditions – icons, metaphors, heroes, rituals, narratives, unwritten laws – demanding unconditional obedience and silence. Demanding your legal rights, expressing your opinion openly or showing human solidarity with other inmates calling for justice usually results in severe punishment. Formal complaints are not encouraged and neither is expressing your views about how prison rules are applied. Prisoners often sew their mouths shut to make a statement or when demanding to see a lawyer. What a powerful symbol of an absurd reality: you have to sew your mouth shut to exercise the right to be heard by the system. In one of the most extreme cases in the jail I was in, one prisoner nailed his testicles to a bench to protest against the endless violation of his rights. I remember one veteran prisoner trying to explain to me the ‘golden’ survival rules of life in prison. The three magic words that protect your life and provide for your physical security are: lal (dumb), kar (deaf), kor (blind). He repeated it almost every day to me: ‘You must stay lal, kar, kor.‘
But this demand to stay lal, kar and kor is not limited to prisons. Azerbaijani society is reduced to the status of a passive observer in an imposed and enforced reality. You must observe the ‘golden’ rules of prison life in order to survive and to be able to protect yourself and those close to you. Under an authoritarian system, you are expected to practise a different form of freedom – the freedom of silence. It is you who chooses this freedom by coming to the ‘right’ conclusion. There is no need to impose repressions on a massive scale. Modern authoritarianism can afford to be smartly ‘softist’ and selective in its application of limitless, subtle or less subtle repressive measures.
Azerbaijan is no longer a society where you can promote or improve legislation or government practice in any meaningful way. Stealing public resources and holding rigged elections that present a veneer of legitimacy – whilst inviting the Council of Europe and other European institutions to observe and participate in this theatrical legitimisation of authoritarianism – discredit an already defunct discourse of freedom and democracy. Another memory overwhelms me: in 2010, prisoners were given ballots and instructed to put them into a ballot box in the presence of guards and the prison administrator. They were not allowed to look at the ballot papers to see whose name was ticked.
So, in such a system, what needs to be changed to support freedom of expression? The short answer is that the system itself needs to be completely changed. And one practical step would be to create an independent television station. Under the present circumstances this is only possible from abroad. A new generation of brave, well-educated and courageous Azerbaijanis must set up a channel outside the country and transmit its programming to Azerbaijan via satellite and the internet. It is extremely important to break the freedom of silence, to stop the fears that grip people’s imaginations and to create platforms for social mobilisation both inside and outside the country. Time invested in non-existent dialogue, imaginary engagement, improving this or that bit of legislation, hope for reform is all wasted time. These efforts only help to prolong the status quo. Any contract between the government and its citizens and any opportunities for reform, if they ever existed, are now broken. The latest media tools and technologies must be used to disrupt the system, to break the silence. Some Arab nations have done it, Russians are doing it, and Azerbaijan can too. The new generation must bring about a democratic brotherhood with unbending courage that will prevail in our Land of Fire. ❒