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Official labels protest as 'meaningless show'
The jailed editor of two Azerbaijani newspapers on Monday stopped the hunger strike launched late in March in protest at purported violations of free expression in the country. The move came after a meeting with the OSCE Representative on Freedom of the Media Miklos Haraszti at the detention facility, his lawyer said.
A group of opposition journalists and politicians who had joined the over 10-day protest have followed suit.
"After Eynulla Fatullayev stopped the hunger strike, we did the same," said one of the protest organizers, Gundalik Azerbaijan executive Shahvalad Chobanoghlu. "We partly achieved our goal, in a sense that we succeeded in drawing enough attention of the local and international community to the protest."
The protest aimed to support Fatullayev, editor of the Russian-language weekly Realny Azerbaijan and the Azeri-language daily Gundalik Azerbaijan newspapers who was sentenced to eight and a half years in jail on charges of posing a terrorist threat, inciting inter-ethnic rifts and tax evasion last year.
The hunger strikers had come out against the imprisonment of the paper editor and two other journalists, calling on international organizations such as the OSCE and Council of Europe to help put a stop to what they described as violations of free speech.
Head of the President's Office socio-political department, Ali Hasanov, has said the government disapproved of the hunger strike. He told reporters on Monday that the journalists' protest was absolutely baseless.
"The hunger strike was turned by some opposition forces into a high-profile show that is absolutely meaningless.
"The situation with mass media in Azerbaijan is not as poor as it is alleged, and overall, the country's leadership is opposed to citizens' participation in any hunger strikes, for this or any other reason," Hasanov said.
As for international groups' demand to free the jailed journalists, he said the authorities would not take such steps under pressure. He reminded that a number of journalists have been released under presidential pardon decrees so far, and more of them are still in the offing.
"Simply put, the president pardons journalists upon requests of their own, their parents or the Press Council, with a hope that they will return to the right path."
Hasanov said journalists could be arrested not over their work but due to taking actions contradicting the law.