Azerbaijan votes in polls boycotted by the opposition

BAKU — Voters in oil-rich Azerbaijan went to the polls on Sunday in a parliamentary election widely expected to cement strongman President Ilham Aliyev’s grip on power and boycotted by major opposition forces. International rights groups have denounced on Sunday’s vote as an “imitation election” accusing the government of the ex-Soviet state of jailing political opponents under trumped-up charges and limiting parties’ ability to campaign. But Aliyev’s Yeni (New) Azerbaijan party, which faces little challenge from the embattled opposition and is set to easily retain its majority in the legislature, has vowed the election will be fully democratic. Central Election Commission chief Mazahir Panakhov told AFP that “all the necessary conditions have been created for the election’s transparent conduct.” Turnout was 28.2 percent at 0800 GMT, four hours after polls opened, the Central Election Commission said. At a polling station in Baku, Alimusa Sattarov, a 58-year-old schoolteacher, said he had supported the ruling party because “Yeni Azerbaijan is the only party capable to ensure the country’s economic development and stability.” A shop assistant Aysel Hadjiyeva, 29, said she has “no trust in Yeni Azerbaijan and its satellite parties that are running in the elections.” “I crossed out all candidates’ names in the ballot paper. This is my protest. I would have voted for the opposition, but they are boycotting the elections,” she said. The tightly-controlled Caucasus nation’s leading opposition parties, including the National Council of Democratic Forces (NCDF), the Musavat party, and the Democratic Party of Azerbaijan, are all boycotting the poll. “The NCDF refuses to stand in this imitation of elections and thereby legitimise it,” the political alliance said ahead of the vote. “The country does not possess even half of the conditions necessary for free and fair elections.” Another major opposition party, the Republican Alternative (REAL) said it will not recognise the election results. The Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) has said it will not send observers to the election, citing “restrictions” imposed on its monitoring mission by the Azerbaijani authorities. “The Azerbaijani government’s crackdown on independent and critical voices has a particularly damaging effect ahead of the country’s Nov. 1 parliamentary elections,” Isabel Santos of the OSCE Parliamentary Assembly said in a statement on Tuesday. None of the elections held in Azerbaijan since Aliyev came in power in 2003 have been recognized as free and fair by international observers. Any display of public discontent and political dissent usually meets a tough government response in Azerbaijan. Rights groups say the government has particularly clamped down on opponents since Aliyev’s re-election for a third term in 2013. Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International rights watchdogs have decried the authorities’ systematic attacks on the regime opponents in the lead-up to the election. “At least 20 people are currently imprisoned in the country merely for having challenged the government’s policies,” London-based Amnesty said in a statement. Human Rights Watch said the authorities have used spurious charges of drugs or weapons possession, tax evasion, and even high treason to jail political activists and critical journalists. During the last year, Aliyev’s leading political opponent, the REAL party leader Ilgar Mammadov, the country’s top critical journalist Khadija Ismayilova, and a prominent Azeri couple that campaigns against human rights abuses, Leyla and Arif Yunus, were sentenced to lengthy jail terms over charges which they dismissed as politically motivated. Despite international criticism, Aliyev secured a third consecutive term in flawed presidential polls in 2013, extending his family’s decades-long grip on power in the energy-rich Caspian Sea nation of 9.5 million people. He took over in 2003 on the death of his father Heydar Aliyev, a former KGB officer and communist-era leader who had ruled newly-independent Azerbaijan with an iron fist since 1993. The mainly Muslim country wedged between Iran and Russia is considered key to Western efforts to reduce Europe’s reliance on Russian hydrocarbons. Depending largely on its energy exports, the country was hit by a drop in oil and gas prices and the global economic downturn, and in late February 2015 devalued its currency, the manat, by 34 percent against the dollar. Over 700 candidates from 13 parties and one bloc are standing for the 125-seat, single-house Parliament, the Milli Majlis, to be elected for a five-year term. Over 5.9 million people are eligible to vote. Polls close at 1500 GMT.