The country's Defense Ministry said in a statement Friday that the reason for the Thursday evening shooting was not immediately known.
The statement did not specify where the shooting took place and officials declined further comment.
News reports in May said an Azerbaijani soldier killed four others in a shooting during exercises.
http://www.etaiwannews.com/etn/news_content.php?id=1168223&lang=eng_news
“Events in Azerbaijan’s capital of Baku happened 20 years ago is nothing but the Genocide. There is not any other determination for what happened,” told Aysor’s correspondent chairman of ‘Return to Hyke’ Social Organisation, Robert Melik-Pashayev.
Deported from Azerbaijan Armenians will receive neither contribution, according to Robert Melik-Pashayev. “Who will compensate? Azerbaijan will not compensate, while our people and government remain silent. Our organisation gives to the world that Armenians left more than 100,000 houses in Baku. Moscow government has investigated and approved that there took place massacres, marauding, and larceny. There are confirming documents at state archives. Azerbaijan’s government must appear in court,” he said.
Armenia’s government can apply to Russian archives for cases of those years to recognize those massacres and deportations against Armenian population in Azerbaijan as Genocide, according to Melik-Pashayev. The public man also pointed that those Azerbaijanis who lived in Armenia never become victims of massacres and deportations while the Armenian community of Azerbaijan became the victim of atrocious and intolerable premeditated massacres.
"He only had five months left to serve. Why would he do it?" 
In July 2009, following a six-week jury trial, Connecticut businessman Frederic Bourke was convicted of violating the FCPA related to his investment in a privatization program in the Republic of Azerbaijan. At trial, prosecutors from DOJ and the United States Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York argued that Bourke and his business partners, particularly Viktor Kozeny, arranged to receive a controlling interest in the State Oil Company of the Azerbaijan Republic (SOCAR) through a secret partnership with government officials. Following the verdict, Bourke was sentenced to one year and one day in prison and ordered to pay a $1 million fine.
The prosecutors in Bourke’scase alleged that Kozeny and members of his investment consortium bribed government officials to encourage them to privatize SOCAR and to ensure that the consortium would gain a controlling interest in it. The government presented evidence that, acting through Oily Rock Ltd., Kozeny and the others bribed government officials by making cash payments to them, by surreptitiously transferring a twothirds interest in Oily Rock’s stake in the privatization venture to them, and by helping them or their family members to obtain medical appointments, visas, and college admissions in the United States. Bourke was not alleged to have played a significant role in carrying out the bribes (although prosecutors presented evidence that he arranged for two officials to receive medical treatment funded by Oily Rock) but the DOJ proceeded against him because of his extensive involvement with Oily Rock (he had invested approximately $8 million in Oily Rock and accepted directorships, salary, and stock options with companies related to it) and his knowledge of rampant corruption in Azerbaijan.
Thus, at Bourke’s trial the government relied on the “conscious avoidance” theory in addition to a conspiracy theory. In regard to the former, the FCPA provides that “[w]hen knowledge of the existence of a particular circumstance is required for an offense, such knowledge is established if a person is aware of a high probability of the existence of such circumstance, unless the person actually believes that such circumstance does not exist.” Based on that provision, the government argued that Bourke was guilty of violating the FCPA because he purposely avoided knowledge of Kozeny’s bribery scheme. To show that Bourke was aware of the high probability that Azeri officials were being bribed as part of the investment effort, the prosecutors presented evidence of corruption in Azerbaijan generally, of Bourke’s personal knowledge of the corruption, and of knowledge by Bourke’s colleagues of the corruption.
In a post-trial motion for acquittal, Bourke argued that the government’s evidence of his alleged knowledge was so tenuous that the court’s conscious avoidance charge likely misled the jury into believing it could convict him on the basis that he had “not tried hard enough to learn the truth.” He also argued that the evidence showed mere negligence at most. The court rejected both contentions, pointing to the testimony of several witnesses that Bourke “knew that corruption was rampant in Azerbaijan” and knew about Kozeny’s “exploits and misdeeds” in Czechoslovakia during thatcountry’s earlier privatization period. In addition, the prosecutors had presented a taperecorded telephone conference among Bourke, a business partner, and their attorneys during which Bourke made statements evidencing a concern that Kozeny was paying bribes. The court also pointed out that, when asked to assume a position on Oily Rock’s board of directors, Bourke instead arranged to accept a position with a related entity, in an apparent attempt to distance himself from knowledge of Oily Rock’s activities. Finally, the court credited the government’s reliance on evidence comparing the scant due diligence work performed by Bourke and his attorneys with the due diligence efforts of others asked to join the consortium, noting that “[t]he Government was entitled to show that others – who were exposed to the same sources as Bourke – had high suspicions regarding the legitimacy of the venture which they were able to later confirm while Bourke willfully shielded himself from learning all the facts.” The court concluded that, even if Bourke did not actually know about the bribery scheme, the government had presented sufficient evidence to show that he “knew of the high probability that bribes were being paid” and “took steps to ensure that he did notacquire knowledge” ofbribery.
http://www.lexology.com/library/detail.aspx?g=c0c8c6c6-6841-4e0c-b457-b149b36e80df
BAKU — Two soldiers in Azerbaijan shot and killed four fellow servicemen before killing themselves, the defence ministry said Friday, in the latest shooting rampage to shock the ex-Soviet republic.
Media linked the killing with what experts say is rampant brutality and corruption in Azerbaijan's military.
The incident was the second mass shooting in Azerbaijan in less than a year, after a man shot dead 12 people at a university in the capital Baku last April before taking his life.
"Two soldiers opened fire killing four servicemen and wounding two before killing themselves," defence ministry deputy spokesman Temur Abdullayev told AFP.
He said the incident occurred on Thursday evening but that no further details were immediately available.
Azerbaijan's Trend news agency cast doubt on the ministry's version of events, quoting military sources as saying the two soldiers who carried out the shooting had been shot and killed while trying to flee the scene. It said a local division commander was among the dead victims.
The opposition Azadliq newspaper reported that the shooting took place in Azerbaijan's Dashkesan region on the border with Armenia.
Azerbaijan is locked in a long-simmering conflict with Armenia over the disputed Nagorny Karabakh region, which broke from Baku's control with Yerevan's support during a war in the early 1990s.
Azadliq said a number of senior officers were among the victims and claimed that violence within the military was to blame for the shooting.
Experts and soldiers' rights groups have raised concerns about violence in the Azerbaijani military, saying a culture of corruption and brutal hazing prevails.
In a 2008 report, the International Crisis Group said the Azerbaijani military was plagued by "endemic corruption, nepotism and hazing."
Azerbaijani military prosecutors in 2008 arrested two sergeants and reprimanded several senior officers after videos surfaced on the Internet of conscript soldiers being savagely beaten.
Authorities have denied, however, that hazing is widespread in the military.
Rights groups have accused militaries throughout the former Soviet Union of tolerating brutal hazing practices inherited from the Soviet army.
The university shooting in April stunned this small, mainly Muslim republic on the Caspian Sea, which had never before seen the kind of public rampages that have plagued some Western countries in recent years.
Last November, a shooting spree on a US military base at Fort Hood, Texas, left 13 people dead and 43 wounded. US officials have said the suspected gunman, US Army Major Nidal Hasan, is being investigated for links to Islamic extremism.
http://www.google.com/hostednews/afp/article/ALeqM5gQmkN9Grc9u_z6PwFQ8xZ5hwcw2w
 | |
| President Heydar Aliyev is determined to ferret out corruption. |
It is a windy, crisp February evening, and a crowd of dignitaries in formal attire is filing into the Khagani Business Center in downtown Baku. United States Ambassador to Azerbaijan Ross Wilson and Deputy Prime Minister Ali Hasanov are scheduled to deliver speeches of thanks to the International Rescue Committee (IRC) for hosting the fundraiser for people forced from their homes by Azerbaijan's long war with Armenia over the disputed Armenian enclave Nagorno-Karabakh (see map below).
But the war ended with a Russian-mediated ceasefire in 1994. Azeris have had seven years to become inured to the fact that some 1.1 million people, or 13 percent of the country's population, were forced from their homes over the course of the six-year conflict. So perhaps it is not so strange that the talk among those present in the Khagani Business Center this evening is not so much about refugees, or internally displaced people, as it is about corruption.
Transparency International, an independent watchdog group founded by former World Bank officials, recently listed Azerbaijan as the third most corrupt nation in their annual survey of 90 countries. "Didn't you hear?" jokes a Swedish United Nations worker as she joins a discussion about the survey results. "Azerbaijan really got the first most corrupt country listing, but the government bribed someone to move them down to number three."
In Azerbaijan, it seems everyone can tell some story from her daily life about having to bribe a corrupt official. Visitors are warned never to open the door unless they expect company, since the police routinely come knocking to collect bribes. A traffic stop is almost certain to result in an immediate "fine," and arrests and fines for trivial offences such as being alone in the evening with a member of the opposite sex are common, locals complain.
These countless examples from people's daily lives can add up to produce a serious macroeconomic effect. According to a World Bank report cited in the leading opposition daily Yeni Musavat last November, 60 percent of the Azeri economy is informal, and thus not subject to scrutiny, accountability, or taxation. Yeni Musavat reported that if the same ratio applies to the government's finances, then some $1.4 billion would be lost to corruption yearly, based on an official budget of $900 million. The paper warned the government that unless it undertook urgent reforms, Azerbaijan would run the risk of being compared to Nigeria - another oil-rich, notoriously corrupt state, which had the dubious distinction of being named the most corrupt country in the world according to the 2000 Transparency International survey.
Indeed, says World Bank Acting Country Manager Saida Bagirova, Azerbaijan will need an improved structure to manage its oil revenues to avoid "ending up like Nigeria." But Bagirova is optimistic and notes that an oil fund has been set up by presidential decree. "This will be an account, separate from the regular budget, strictly for oil revenue, with the limit that only dividends from the fund may be tapped during a one-year period," says Bagirova, who stresses that the World Bank is "very interested to see this fund be transparent." Currently the World Bank plans to distribute $300 million over a three-year period through the fund. But Bagirova says the amount could be tripled if the public sector shows an interest in implementing the World Bank's recommended reforms.
Azerbaijani President Heydar Aliyev has guarded his power jealously since 1993, when he seized power in a bloodless coup. International observers site corrupt voting practices in every post-Aliyev election. Observers from the Organization on Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) and the United Nations reported widespread abuses in the country's first legislative elections in 1995. Likewise, the U.S. State Department reported that the 1998 presidential election that returned Aliyev to power were "marred by numerous, serious irregularities … and lack of transparency in the vote counting process."
Reports from the last November's parliamentary elections indicate that things may not have improved very much since. Jacob, an Englishman who came to Baku as a businessman and who did not want to give his last name, acted as an official observer for the OSCE last November. On night of the IRC fundraiser in Baku, he recalled his experiences:
"The election officials did everything they could think of to keep us away from the counting tables, They told me to go out to dinner, go for a walk, out for a smoke, and they seated us far away from the actual counting tables and the ballots. But when I asked, or rather demanded, to be close enough to actually see, the other observers gained courage and we all came across the hall to the tables. … The electricity failed twice, but everyone had cigarette lighters, so we held them up and watched as [the officials] pulled ballots from under the tables and switched them with those on the table. Only after that did the chairman start the vote count,"
Jacob estimates that about 400 ballots were swapped that night.
As Rauf Arifoglu, Yeni Musavat's editor in chief, has discovered more than once, openly criticizing government corruption can have unpleasant consequences. " This government does not like independent thinking," Arifoglu complains, pointing to one incident in which masked assailants severely beat a journalist from the paper shortly after his story on corruption in the Azeri government was published. The incident was not atypical. The U.S. State Department notes that journalists reported 60 cases of harassment and intimidation last year and that on April 29, 2000, police beat 17 journalists covering a local demonstration.
Arifoglu has spent time in prison, himself. Last August, a member of the Musavat opposition party hijacked a plane and demanded that President Aliyev respond to former U.S. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright's letter requesting that the elections be conducted fairly. Arifgolu conveyed the hijacker's demands to the chief of national security and was put in jail until October for concealing prior knowledge of the hijacking. The government argues that Arifoglu was party to a criminal publicity stunt. Arifoglu still maintains that he was imprisoned on trumped-up charges to keep him quiet during the period before the election.
As yet, no trial date has been set for Arifoglu, though he still faces up to 20 years in prison. He believes the charges are being kept pending to keep him in check without the need for a high-profile court case. According to the U.S. State Department, he may have reason to suspect as much. "The Azeri judiciary," it concluded last year, "does not function independently of the executive branch and is corrupt and inefficient."
But many here say that corruption in the judicial branch pales next to that in the Ministry of Health. "Absolutely, the most corrupt," says an English director of an NGO that works with Azeri orphans. Irina Stirbu, a maternal-child health program manager with Save the Children in Baku agrees: "Because of the level of corruption [in the Ministry of Health] reforms needed to advance our work from humanitarian assistance to meaningful development can not happen."
In fact, officials with the United Nations Population Fund, Mercy Corps International, and Pathfinder International, all of whom are involved in funding and advancing health care in the country, say the levels of corruption run so deep that often doctors even prefer to perform abortions on women rather that dole out contraceptives because of the bribe dollars they can collect from an abortion procedure. "Yes, it is true," says Dr. Elvira Anadolu, country director of Pathfinder International in Azerbaijan. "To make money, doctors may prefer abortions versus issuing oral contraceptives," she sighs but adds that the situation is improving with increased training efforts from international organizations.
Though it is perfectly willing to make political capital out of corruption in the current administration, the opposition has given little intimation of how they would do things differently if given power. Isa Gambar, head of the leading opposition party Musavat and chairman of the parliament during the time his party was in power from 1992-1993, is adamant about the need for change: "We need to change the laws to discourage bribe taking and decrease the level of dependence the people have come to expect from their government. And if some company is chosen for a government project, we will list all the reasons for our choice to make bids transparent."
When asked to elaborate on his anti-corruption plans, Gambar replied, "It is hard to explain all our programs," but insists he has sent a detailed package to the president.
Nara Aliyeva, a young Azeri woman who works for a humanitarian organization in Baku, is unimpressed by Gambar's pronouncements. "All his words are nice, yes, but why, when they were in power before did they not do these things?" she asks. "In 1992 to 1993, things were horrible - the streets were so unsafe that you would not dare to walk about after dark. Only when our [current] president took power did things settle down. He stopped the war with Armenia and took control of our streets."
Indeed, in a land where everything can be bought, many here are wondering what, exactly, is the price for peace and freedom?
Margaret Woodbury is a freelance journalist based in San Francisco and New York.
http://www.worldpress.org/Europe/211.cfm#down
Eynulla Fatullayev, an Azerbaijani newspaper editor was sentenced to 8½ years in prison. He sent to the press an article asserting that the ex-Soviet nation could support a U.S. attack on neighboring Iran.
The Court for Grave Crimes convicted Eynulla Fatullayev, the founder and editor of the Russian-language weekly Real Azerbaijan and the Azeri-language daily Everyday Azerbaijan, on charges of making a terrorist threat and inciting interethnic conflict.
Fatullayev denounced the court's verdict as politically driven. "That's evidence of political pressure on me as a journalist," he said.
Fatullayev's case is the latest in a series of prosecutions of independent media figures in the oil-rich Caspian Sea nation that have raised concerns in the West.
The charges against Fatullayev were filed in response to the article in Real Azerbaijan which claimed that Azerbaijan's President Ilham Aliev could support a U.S. military action against Iran.
The article, written under an alias, listed sites in Azerbaijan that could be attacked by Iran if Baku were to support Washington in the event of military action against Iran.
Aliev's government has cultivated close ties with Washington and contributed troops to the U.S.-led coalition in Iraq, and charges against Fatullayev reflected official concerns about angering Iran.
Tehran has feared a U.S. attack and threatened to strike back at any country that cooperates with it. The Azerbaijan government has pledged its territory won't be used for military action against Iran, but people living along the border were nervous, pointing to a U.S.-built radar facility and the upgrading of an airport near the border with Iran. Both projects are U.S.-financed.
Both Fatullayev's newspapers were forced to suspend publication in the spring after authorities had evicted them from their offices.
Fatullayev has been in prison since April when he was sentenced to 2½ years in prison on charges of disseminating false information related to the country's six-year war with Armenia over the territory of Nagorno-Karabakh.
Previously, Fatullayev had received a two-year suspended sentence for libeling a top law enforcement official.
Aliev, who took over from his father in a 2003 election denounced by opponents as a sham, has faced persistent criticism over the heavy-handed treatment of independent media and opposition parties.
http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=7238
