When advocating for peace becomes treason — the arrest of Bahruz Samadov

>Lala Darchinova, an Azerbaijani researcher and activist, believes that through such arrests, Azerbaijan seeks to ‘establish control’ over independent peacebuilding which brings Armenian and Azerbaijani activists, journalists, and academics together because it poses a ‘danger to’ Baku.

>‘It’s very paradoxical that there are peace negotiations going on or calls from Azerbaijan to sign a peace agreement, but at the same time, they are silencing the people in the country who are genuinely trying to build some form of a peace or not hating or dehumanising Armenians’, she says. ‘It just proves to me that Azerbaijan is not sincere in their intentions about the peace and negotiations.’

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>Laurence Broers, an associate fellow at Chatham House’s Russia and Eurasia programme, also suggests that the charges pressed against Samadov are ‘qualitatively different’.

>‘We’ve got this quite ironic situation where ostensibly Armenia and Azerbaijan are working on a peace treaty and are moving towards peace and the conflict is over — that’s the mantra’, he tells OC Media. ‘And yet, now we see that it is young scholars who are working on peace, working on Armenian–Azerbaijani relations who are being arrested and they’re not being arrested in Bahruz’s case on typical charges that relate to narcotics or to cash, but that relate to contacts with Armenians.’

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>Broers says that while Armenia and Azerbaijan might sign an ‘extremely shallow framework agreement’ before COP29, such an agreement would be merely performative, and not actually resolve anything. 

>He notes that Baku has suggested that this conference will be a ‘COP of peace’. 

>‘But how can we take that seriously, when we see that those last scattered independent voices who were generating more critical perspectives on peace are being arrested?’ asks Broers. ‘Who’s going  to want to participate in dialogue meetings now when they know that such contacts could be leveraged against them as evidence of treason?’

>Broers adds that Azerbaijan appears ‘very reluctant’ to let go of the conflict with Armenia despite its statements to the contrary, due to the ‘affordances’ that the conflict provides. He says that as well as providing a central issue to mobilise people around, the conflict was seen by some as the first military victory that Azerbaijan had won ‘as a nation state’, prompting a ‘reluctance’ to move fully towards peace. 

And yet we must try and not get discouraged. Easy or not, peace achieved by the people is a thing of beauty.