Southwest
Asia:
Azerbaijan,
US
Sign
Anti-Drug
Agreement
Despite
Human
Rights
Abuses
5/27/05
Building upon a January 2003 agreement to cooperate on drug law enforcement issues, the governments of the United States and Azerbaijan signed an agreement Monday in which the US will provide nearly $1.5 million a year for "technical assistance and training" of Azerbaijani anti-drug police and additional $500,000 for unspecified purposes. According to the quaintly named official government news service, the Azerbaijan State Telegraph Agency, the yearly half-million will be "for the benefit of the government of Azerbaijan." Located in the strife-ridden Caucasus on the western shore of the Caspian Sea, the predominantly Muslim country of eight million people sits squarely astride major transshipment routes for Afghan opium and heroin headed for Western European markets. The country is especially vulnerable to penetration by drug smugglers because of its loss of the conflictive Nagorno-Karabakh region to neighboring Armenia in fighting after the fall of the Soviet Union. That region, home to an ethnic Armenian majority that rejected Azerbaijani control, remains relatively unpoliced and its borders uncontrolled. The US State Department's 2004 report on human rights reported that Azerbaijan's judiciary was "corrupt, inefficient, and did not function independently." The report went on to detail a raft of human rights abuses, some of them involving the nation's criminal justice system: "There were four deaths that occurred in custody allegedly due to beatings. Police tortured and beat persons in custody, and used excessive force to extract confessions. In most cases, the Government took no action to punish abusers. Prison conditions remained harsh and life threatening, and some prisoners died as a result of these conditions." The report did note that local and international humanitarian groups had been allowed to conduct independent monitoring of prison conditions, but continued to charge that "Arbitrary arrest and detention and lengthy pretrial detention continued to be problems" and "After the October 2003 presidential elections, authorities conducted a wave of politically motivated arrests of more than 700 persons, including, opposition members, journalists and election officials." Despite this, the newly allocated funds will go to support five programs, including a resident legal advisor project, a project to develop law enforcement, criminal law reform, a project to deal with trafficking in persons, and a forensics lab project. The agreement was signed Monday in the Azerbaijani capital of Baku. US Ambassador to Azerbaijan Reno Harnish and Azerbaijani foreign minister Elmar Mammadyarov inked the document. The signing marked "yet another step in the steadily developing strategic alliance between the government of the Azerbaijan Republic and the government of the United States," said Mammadyarov.
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