ARMENIA, AZERBAIJAN AND RUSSIA

Alexander Lapshin is an Israeli based, Soviet Union born journalist and travel blogger specialising in international relations, military conflicts, human rights and travelling. He is also a former political prisoner of one of the world’s most autocratic regimes, Azerbaijan, after a trip to the disputed territory of Nagorno-Karabakh in 2011 landed the 40-year-old Lapshin in a Belarusian jail in 2016. Later he was abducted to Azerbaijan where he was jailed, beaten and coerced into recognising Nagorno-Karabakh as Azerbaijan territory. Nagorno-Karabakh had for centuries been entirely populated by ethnic Armenians and has been a consistent cause of Armenian-Azeri tensions. Alexander Lapshin addressed The Sydney Institute on Monday 12 February 2024. His visit to Australia was sponsored by the Armenian National Committee of Australia. The paper which follows is an edited transcript of Alexander Lapshin’s address to The Sydney Institute.

ARMENIA, AZERBAIJAN AND RUSSIA

ALEXANDER LAPSHIN

It is a huge honour for me to be a guest of The Sydney Institute.

A couple of thoughts about myself. My family is originally from Poland and Ukraine. They’re Holocaust survivors from Krakow and the city of Lyubov in Ukraine. During the Second World War, those who survived moved to Soviet Union. I was born in the city of Sverdlovsk in Eastern Russia. In 1990, two months before the collapse of the Soviet Union, our family emigrated to Israel. So, I have lived in Israel for most of my life. I studied at university and served three years in the Israeli military. Half of my service I spent in the well-known Gaza Strip and, another part, the Lebanese border and the West Bank.

I studied business administration and law at university but decided that working in an office, at least for me, was boring. I decided to travel the globe and now have visited 152 countries. One of the places I visited was Artsakh, a small territory, mostly populated by Armenian Christians. But today it is also depopulated because people have been expelled. In 2011, I travelled around the Caucasus zone, including Georgia, Armenia, Azerbaijan and Artsakh, Nagorno-Karabakh. Just as a normal tourist. I arrived in Yerevan, the capital city of Armenia and rented a car to travel around like most of the tourists. I spent two and a half days in Nagorno-Karabakh taking photos and videos and meeting with local people. My visit was exceptionally short. I went back to Armenia and left.

Afterwards, I published a few articles in Europe and Israel and a couple of articles in the Russian media about my trip, mostly about the architectural and cultural heritage of this area and about the people, the food. There was nothing political in it except for a couple of points. I mentioned in brief the history of this region. Armenians had lived there for close to 1000 years. But during the Soviet times, Stalin decided to surrender this territory to the Azerbaijan Soviet Socialist Republic. In Soviet times, there weren’t any real borders. It was more like states in Australia. Just administrative borders. People crossed easily from one republic to another. There were 15 republics in one country.

After 1991, and the collapse of the Soviet Union, all the administrative borders of the Soviet Union were converted to real borders and sometimes front lines. It was the same with Azerbaijan and Armenia. Artsakh became part of the Republic of Azerbaijan. But its population was around 95 per cent Christian Armenian while most of the Azerbaijani population are Shia Muslims. Even before the collapse of the Soviet Union, there were pogroms and massacres of Armenians in the city of Sumgait near Baku, where half a million ethnic Armenians lived. Hundreds of them were killed and thousands wounded. Most Armenians left Azerbaijan within a couple of years. Half a million Armenians left this country where they had lived all their lives.

Some went to Russia, many to the United States, Australia and Armenia. Others moved to Artsakh, Nagorno-Karabakh. But then the first government of independent Azerbaijan decided to proceed with ethnic cleansing of the area, and to expel all the Christians out of Azerbaijan. Before the collapse of the Soviet Union, Christians were some 25 per cent of the population – Armenians, Georgians, Russians, Germans, different ethnic nationalities. Today, Azerbaijan is 99.5 per cent Shia Muslim.

Armenians call that removal the first Karabakh war. Armenian guerrilla fighters were able to win that war, and they kept this territory under their control within the territory of Republic of Azerbaijan. It makes up about 20 per cent of total territory of Azerbaijan. In 1993 the Republic of Artsakh, Nagorno-Karabakh, was established. In 2020, the Azerbaijani army invaded Artsakh, Nagorno-Karabakh. In 44 days, they were able to occupy most of the territory – 75 per cent of the territory held by Armenians – and 5000 Armenian soldiers and civilians were killed, tens of thousands wounded and tens of thousands became refugees into Armenia. In September 2023, the Azerbaijanis attacked Artsakh again and this time were able to occupy all of the territory. The Armenians were forced to leave. Today, there are no Armenians at all in Artsakh, Nagorno-Karabakh. Azerbaijan is Armenian-free.

In 2011, as I mentioned, I visited this area. I published a few articles and continued my normal life. In December 2016, during my trip to the Baltic states, I had a stopover in Minsk, the capital of the Republic of Belarus. In the middle of the night in my hotel, somebody knocked on the door. Through a hole in the door, I could see masked policemen with Kalashnikov machine guns. They were telling me to open the door immediately. I opened the door, they entered and said, “You’re under arrest at the request of the Republic of Azerbaijan.” I asked if this was a joke. It was unbelievable. They replied no and that it was a decision of the Prosecutor General of the Republic of Belarus. They showed me the papers. I was under arrest.

Before we left the room I asked to go to the bathroom. As it happened, I had left my cell phone there and this actually saved my life. They let me go and from there I sent messages to social media and emails to my friends and to my wife. I was being arrested for visiting Artsakh five years before. The armed men heard my phone and broke into the bathroom, threw me on the floor and I heard them saying in Russian that my texting was a problem. I think the original plan was to take me from the hotel to the airport and take me to Azerbaijan unlawfully, to kidnap me. I found out, much later, more about the plan. One of my subscribers in the US, who was at the time working in the local Minsk International Airport at traffic control, told me that on that very day the jet of the president of Azerbaijan was at the airport in the city of Minsk, with four armed people inside with machine guns. They waited all night and then returned to Azerbaijan without any passengers.  As he saw it, the plan was to abduct me.

Instead, I spent two days in a central police station in the city of Minsk. I was deprived of any visits, even as my wife tried to organise meetings with my attorney. I was refused. I asked for the ambassador or somebody from Israeli embassy. That was refused as well. Belarussian police and investigators told me I would be going to Azerbaijan. This was the decision of the president. The next day, media across the ex-Soviet Union, Europe and Israel published details of my arrest in the Republic of Belarus. This prevented my abduction to Azerbaijan and I spent two months in a Belarussian jail.

We applied to the Belarussian courts, the central court of the city of Minsk, but the court decided that I had committed crimes against Azerbaijan by visiting Nagorno-Karabakh. Based on Azerbaijani law, this is a crime. I had also called the president of Azerbaijan a dictator and this had insulted him. Based on the Criminal Code of the Republic of Azerbaijan, any insult of the president or his family is liable to a five-year jail sentence. So, finally, I was taken to Azerbaijan.

I was taken to Baku. A few hours before I left the prison in Belarus, President Lukashenko of Belarus held a press conference. My cell mates were watching it on a television and they called me. There were 30 people in a small cell, four metres by four metres. My cell mate called out that the president was talking about me. And, as I watched, the president of Belarus was asked by some journalists, “What about Alexander Lapshin?” He didn’t expect such a question and simply replied, “Where is my minister of Internal Affairs?”

That day I was taken to Azerbaijan, without any decision of the court. I spent seven months in solitary confinement in Azerbaijani jail, between the cities of Baku and Sumgait. This was very symbolic. Those two cities had the biggest Armenian populations before the massacres of 1988. From the beginning, Azerbaijani investigators told me that I must plead guilty. And, the second point, I had to say in the court that Karabakh is Azerbaijan. I tried to explain that this was a nonsense. I might say that Australia is part of Azerbaijan, but it doesn’t make sense. They said no, this is because of our president. This is kind of a gift to our president.

Pictures and portraits of President Aliyev and his father were everywhere. From time to time, I was invited to the office of the head of the jail. His name was Colonel Rashid Zafar and he had a huge office. Sitting in his office, I started to count the portraits of President Aliyev. There were 44 portraits of President Aliyev, plus two statues of Aliyev. When I asked if he really need so many faces of his president, he told me to shut up. Yashar Magiramoff, the deputy head of the jail had just 35 portraits of Ilham Aliyev. This is a real dictatorship, much like North Korea.

I refused to cooperate with them. I was not going to plead guilty, because I was not guilty. My job as a journalist was to travel around the globe and to provide information from different countries. And, secondly, I said that my treatment was unlawful. For months, I was deprived of my attorney and of any meetings with my family or with the Red Cross. I was alone. All conversations were in front of Azerbaijani investigators. I was told I had two options. First of all, I could be sexually raped. The second option was to cooperate with them. I was told if I cooperated with them, they believed that the president would pardon me. I could go home. So, I said okay, I’m ready to say Karabakh is Azerbaijan, Brazil is Azerbaijan, Canada is Azerbaijan.

For all that, I received a sentence of three and a half years in prison. I was taken back to solitary confinement. A few days after the final judgement, I was assaulted in my cell by four masked men. The light stayed on 24 hours a day in my cell. There were no windows. The masked men entered at night while I was sleeping. I woke up because I felt I was dying. Three of them held my hands and legs while one of them just jumped on my chest and then started to strangle me. They then put a pillow or some such over my face so I couldn’t see anything. After a few seconds, I lost consciousness. The next time I opened my eyes, after four days in the intensive care unit of a local hospital, I had a broken hand, broken fingers, broken jaw, broken teeth. The worst was, I couldn’t feel the left part of my body. As if I had had a stroke. I had a brain injury.

For about half a year, I couldn’t walk normally. Now I am okay. I was told by Azerbaijani officials who visited at the hospital, that I had tried to commit suicide but they had saved my life. And, because of my good behaviour, I had received a pardon from the President of Azerbaijan. I could now fly to Israel. They told me I was lucky. I couldn’t talk because I had a broken jaw. (I now have some kind of metallic construction inside my mouth as a result.) But I could write with my right hand. I wrote the question, “Was I raped?” They said, “No, you’re lucky.” These days, I try to keep a sense of humour.

I spent two more weeks in an Israeli hospital before being released. Immediately, I applied to European Court of Human Rights in a claim against the Republic of Azerbaijan. On 20 May 2021, I won the case and Azerbaijan was found guilty of illegal arrest, torture and attempted murder by the European Court. I was awarded compensation, but Azerbaijan refused to comply with the decision and refused to pay the compensation. I haven’t received a dollar. I then applied to the Committee of Human Rights of the United Nations with the same complaint, and I won again. Azerbaijan was found guilty of the same things, and one very important sentence came from the Committee of Human Rights of the United Nations – that any visit of any individual, any politician, any journalist to any disputed area cannot be considered as a crime. There was no basis for any arrest or extradition in my case. This is a very important point. In both cases, Azerbaijan refused to comply with the decisions, and refused any compensation. This shows what Azerbaijan is. It doesn’t care about the decisions of the court and the United Nations.

First question and answer:

Q: Now we go to questions and discussions. First of all, just tell us briefly what it’s like to be in solitary confinement. Most of this room hasn’t been there you know. Also, the connection with Belarus, which is a close ally or controlled by Russia. How do you see Russia’s involvement in this? Just a couple of quick points.

A: When I was in a Belarussian jail before the extradition, it was in a small room with a lot of other people, with different criminals and different drug addicts. I felt very unsafe and very uncomfortable. I was just dreaming of being alone. But when I spent seven months in solitary confinement it was a horrible experience.

My small cell was three by three metres. The toilet was a hole in the concrete. Water came for one hour in the morning and one hour in the evening. There was no hot water at all. Once every seven to ten days, I was taken to the shower for about five minutes. And then I also had to wash my clothes. The food was really bad. In the morning there was a porridge or water soup with hot water with small pieces of cabbage and potato inside. I called it water soup. In the evening, another two options – porridge or mashed potatoes with small parts of insects inside, which means meat. After about two or three months in such kind of conditions, people start to feel sick. I felt different pains, started to lose hair, to lose my teeth. My skin changed. Not diseased, but it was different. And because I couldn’t take a shower, I had number of infections which were dealt with after I was released in Israel. And all the people were the same.

Jail is a terrible place. When we think about jail, we think about a small cell. But that’s not all. The worst punishment is not having any television, no newspapers, no books, just nothing, and no windows. For example, I didn’t know what time it was. If I received porridge, this meant breakfast. Water soup could mean the afternoon. More or less. So, dinner meant mashed potatoes. But, from time to time, they changed the food. For example, I was sleeping and I didn’t have a watch. They said dinner was coming, but I thought it was the middle of the night. After a couple of weeks of such a schedule I felt really bad emotionally and psychologically. I started to think about suicide. It is like a sickness. I had never had any psychological depressions in my life. Like all of us, I had bad moods from time to time, but I didn’t have any experience of real psychological trouble. I couldn’t sleep normally, I couldn’t stop thinking about suicide. It was like a horror movie from childhood. When I was sleeping, I had horrible dreams. And then I could hear other prisoners screaming “Allahu Akbar! We will kill you. We will find your family.” So, prisoners were best avoided if possible.

Surprisingly, the Russian Federation opposed my extradition from Belarus to Azerbaijan. Russia and Belarus have a common constitution. I have Russian citizenship and it is prohibited to extradite Russian citizens from Belarus or Russia to another country. When President Lukashenko decided to extradite me to Azerbaijan, this was a kind of slap in the face for Putin. So, Russia supported me. Not because of my personality, but because of the move by President Lukashenko of Belarus. Putin himself at a press conference called for my immediate release. And Minister of Foreign Affairs Lavrov said the same. I couldn’t believe this because all of my life I have criticised Putin’s regime. I may have been the first person to receive such support from the Russian Federation. They are confused because I left Russia because I didn’t like it. But Israel did nothing.