Thursday, April 16

First journalists, now students?!!

Last night, I got an e-mail with the following attachment:

The head of the south regional office of Dalga Youth Movement Parviz Azimov has faced various prosecution and pressure by university authorities due to his articles and current acitivities. Finally, on February 27th he was expeled from Lankaran State University with false accusation. We would like to remind that, Parviz Azimov studies at the fourth grade at above-mentioned university and has not had any problems so far. University authorities, who could not find any evidences about his education, orginazed false sabotage against him. They accused him in alleged fight at the university and expeled him.


As Dalga Youth Movement we urgently request to stop this illegitimate act, to restore Parviz Azimov’s education at the university, and we want people who organized this sabotage against him apolagize. We state that we will use any possible means to restore justice and to defend Parviz Azimov’s rights. We call everybody to support us in our way of defending the law and human rights. We demand the related organs to fulfill their duties.


These variations of different accusations simply do not stop (I sometimes think that there is a person in charge of some sort of creativity department on accusations). With journalists it was easier, anything from terrorism involvement to treason accusations, followed by imprisonment and a sentence but with a fourth year university student who unlike his other peers chose to speak out it would have been a little too much if he was accused of things as such, so instead, he was thrown out of the university. 


This incident reminds me of an event that took place few months back when I was asked to give a short presentation to a group of foreign exchange students on Azerbaijani culture. The conversation then turned into Q&A session, where we started talking about politics and general situation in the country. I answered each of their questions with honesty. Well, it turned out that none of the profs who were sitting in the room were pleased with my honesty (even though students were very happy). Nothing happened to me, well, except I was never asked to give another presentation by those people to another group of students. 


Its like pushing the "mute" button- you press it and there is no more sound! Will someone take that remote control and throw it away?! I wish it was that easy...

2 comments:

Onnik Krikorian said...

Thoughts on the Road has more:

Parviz was one of my best students while I was in Azerbaijan. He was the only one of my students to actually produce articles about corruption in the nation's education system. I had quite a few students who spoke about it - but naturally it was a very daunting subject to tackle. Many of my students were still studying at universities - so really digging into this subject could be dangerous for their academic careers.

[...]
Young journalist suffers consequences for rocking boat

Maka B said...

Thank you Arzu and Parviz for your honesty and bravery. As a former Peace Corps Volunteer in Azerbaijan as well as former English teacher, I can understand the system in which this is happening very intimately. I thank you for this blog and look forward to reading it often.
Azerbaycana eshq olsun, ok amma daha vacib heqiqeti eshq olsun Azerbaycanda.