BY GAREN YEGPARIAN
Think about it. Black holes have an event horizon beyond which we cannot observe reality. Azerbaijan has its border beyond which reality is also twisted to fit megalomaniac Aliyev’s fantasies. Both, black holes and Azerbaijan are, for the time being, utterly inhospitable to decent, normal, human beings. Both are incredibly powerful, but destructively so. This time, we’ll focus on Azerbaijan’s mangling of the media.
Over the course of the last few months, there have been at least three different instances which demonstrate Baku’s extreme sensitivity to any criticism. This is unsurprising since that country is not much more than a poorly disguised dictatorship led by an extremely thin-skinned tyrant who is eager to garner international acceptance.
The best known case is that of Alexander Lapshin, the travel blogger, who dared travel to Artsakh. Imagine that! Worse still, he dared write about it. This put him in the crosshairs of the bumbling bureaucrats of Baku. They wanted to make an example of him. In Belarus and its president, they found willing partners in crime. I sense shades of axe-murderer Safarov’s release from Hungary. Just as we learned Azerbaijan had bought a significant part of a bond issuance from Budapest, I suspect we will one day learn of a “polite”
