{"id":57180,"date":"2014-05-01T12:56:56","date_gmt":"2014-05-01T11:56:56","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.indexoncensorship.org\/?p=57180"},"modified":"2017-03-27T12:45:15","modified_gmt":"2017-03-27T11:45:15","slug":"azerbaijan-atletico-madrid","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.indexoncensorship.org\/newsite02may\/?p=57180","title":{"rendered":"Azerbaijan — Atl\u00e9tico Madrid\u2019s authoritarian friends"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"Striker<\/a>

Striker Diego Costa during the first leg of Atl\u00e9tico Madrid’s Champions League semi-final against Chelsea (Image: Gonzalez Fuentes Oscar\/Demotix)<\/p><\/div>\n

Atl\u00e9tico Madrid are the toast of world football fans at the moment. They\u2019re having possibly their greatest season ever, qualifying for the Champions\u2019 League Final and looking set to break the Barcelona\/Real Madrid duopoly over Spain\u2019s La Liga.<\/p>\n

Sports fans love nothing more than an underdog story, and the Atl\u00e9tico one feels just right. Always the less glamorous team in the Spanish capital, they\u2019re finally having their time in the sun. Only a complete killjoy would rain on the parade of super striker Diego Costa and his team mates.<\/p>\n

So here I go.<\/p>\n

Atl\u00e9tico\u2019s shirts bear the advertising slogan \u201cAzerbaijan: Land of Fire\u201d. They are sponsored by the government of Ilham Aliyev, a man who combines the callousness of the classic dictator with the appearance and language of an aspiring sales executive who\u2019s read one too many management manuals. His Twitter page bears the fascinatingly banal phrase: \u201cWe turn initiatives into reality.\u201d I have absolutely no idea what that means (suggestions in the comments, please). Whatever it does mean, he\u2019s clearly quite pleased with it, as it pops up regularly on his website.<\/p>\n

The deal (sorry, \u201cstrategic agreement\u201d) with Atl\u00e9tico came about in December 2012, and was renewed in March 2014.<\/p>\n

The explanatory blurb<\/span><\/a>\u00a0on the Atl\u00e9tico website is packed with more nonsense of the \u201cinitiatives into reality\u201d variety.<\/p>\n

Atl\u00e9tico is not a football club, it is a \u201csports entity\u201d.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe link between Azerbaijan and Atl\u00e9tico Madrid,\u201d we are told, \u201cis much more than a traditional commercial sponsorship associated with a shirt sponsorship, because it has atremendous value, as the tool to achieve important goals, through actions of a different nature, sports, commercial, communication, marketing and corporate social responsibility for the benefit of all parties.\u201d<\/p>\n

This is almost poetic in its nonsense; in fact the \u201cactions of a different nature, sports, commercial, communication, marketing and corporate social responsibility for the benefit of all parties\u201d brings to mind no less literary masterpiece than Lucky\u2019s monologue<\/span><\/a>\u00a0in Samuel Beckett\u2019s Waiting for Godot: \u201c…the practice of sports such as tennis football running cycling swimming flying floating riding gliding conating camogie skating tennis of all kinds…\u201d<\/p>\n

All this would merely be amusing if Aliyev\u00a0was, say, head of a fleet car dealership in Runcorn. Unfortunately, he\u2019s not. He\u2019s the autocratic head of a regime bloated on oil and gas revenue that is engaged in an enormous whitewashing exercise composed of equal parts propaganda and censorship.<\/p>\n

The propaganda part can be quite amusing: the Knightsbride nightclub called Baku, after Azerbaijan\u2019s capital; the glossy magazine, also called Baku; the shiny skyscrapers; the on-message Eurovision Song Contest entry (Start A Fire, sung by Dilara Kazimova).<\/p>\n

The censorship bit is rather less fun, as a search on the Index on Censorship website will quickly reveal.<\/p>\n

There is the case of journalist Khadija Islamova, harassed and blackmailed by the authorities; Index on Censorship award winning newspaper Azadliq<\/a>, threatened with financial ruin deliberately brought about by state agencies; Idrak Abbasov, brutally assaulted<\/a> for daring to report on demolitions of houses by the state oil company. There is also Rafiq Tagi<\/a>, a murdered columnist whose killer has never been brought to justice; dissident \u201cDonkey bloggers\u201d Adnan Hajizade Emin Milli, imprisoned for hooliganism after going to the police to report that they had been assaulted; reporter Eynulla Fatullayev, jailed for four years, and hit with false drug charges; critical journalist Elmar Huseynov, murdered in 2005.<\/p>\n

Are these victims of Atl\u00e9tico Madrid? No, it would be unfair to say that. For a start, Atl\u00e9tico are not the only club to benefit from shirt sponsorship from dubious regimes; Barcelona, with their smug \u201cm\u00e9s que un club\u201d image, ditched UNICEF from their jerseys to sign a deal with Qatar, a country that locks up poets<\/a>, for God\u2019s sake. No one blames Lionel Messi for the fate of Mohammed al-Ajami.<\/p>\n

Nonetheless, Azerbaijan\u2019s deal with Atl\u00e9tico is one side of Aliyev and his cronies’ colossal image management exercise; and the imprisonment of critical reporters, bloggers and activists is the other. They cannot be separated entirely.<\/p>\n

We should enjoy the football and praise the players, but we owe it to brave determined Azerbaijainis to ask some tough questions of Atl\u00e9tico\u2019s officials, even as they celebrate.<\/p>\n

This article was posted on May 1, 2014 at indexoncensorship.org<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

We should enjoy the football and praise the players, but we owe it to brave Azerbaijanis to ask some tough questions about Atl\u00e9tico’s relationship with Ilham Aliyev’s repressive regime, Padraig Reidy writes<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":57187,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","_mi_skip_tracking":false},"categories":[7145,8867,4059,581],"tags":[6395,115,2160,4423,6394,7389],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.indexoncensorship.org\/newsite02may\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/57180"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.indexoncensorship.org\/newsite02may\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.indexoncensorship.org\/newsite02may\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.indexoncensorship.org\/newsite02may\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.indexoncensorship.org\/newsite02may\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=57180"}],"version-history":[{"count":11,"href":"https:\/\/www.indexoncensorship.org\/newsite02may\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/57180\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":87623,"href":"https:\/\/www.indexoncensorship.org\/newsite02may\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/57180\/revisions\/87623"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.indexoncensorship.org\/newsite02may\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/57187"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.indexoncensorship.org\/newsite02may\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=57180"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.indexoncensorship.org\/newsite02may\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=57180"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.indexoncensorship.org\/newsite02may\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=57180"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}