Azerbaijani police lock down village after environmental protests
Entry and exit to the village of Soyudlu has been blocked since Wednesday, after riot police clashed with local people protesting environmental damage caused by a goldmine. Ten protesters were detained, while 15 were reportedly injured in confrontations with riot police.
Two journalists are also reported to have been detained and had their phones confiscated while covering the protests on Thursday.
On 20 June, over a hundred residents of the village of Soyudlu in the Gadabay District gathered to protest pollution of the area by a mining company, assembling near an artificial lake reportedly used to dump acid waste from the mine.
They were also protesting plans to construct a second, similar artificial lake in the village. Protesters claimed that waste from the mines has caused significant damage to human health and the nature of the region.
Residents reported that around 15 people were injured and five detained on Tuesday after riot police were called in to disperse the protesters. Five more were reported to have been detained the following day, as protests continued.
Videos from Soyudlu showed police using tear gas, pepper spray, and physical violence against those protesting. In a widely-shared video, an elderly woman walking away from riot police is pepper-sprayed in the face, with later footage showing her lying on the ground as other protesters attempt to assist her.
Many Azerbaijanis expressed outrage over the footage online, and demanded that police be punished for using violence against peaceful protesters.
On Wednesday, the Interior Ministry and the head of the region both acknowledged that protesters had been injured, but suggested that protesters had acted violently and police had shown restraint in their handling of the situation.
The following day, Minister of Ecology and Natural Resources Mukhtar Babayev visited Gadabay District and stated that the issue would be investigated.
‘Monitoring has already started. We will try to quickly clarify all questions and prepare and present the necessary proposals to the Cabinet of Ministers’, said Babayev.
The gold mines are officially operated by a British company, Anglo Asian Mining Plc, managed by Iranian businessperson Reza Vaziri. However, a 2016 investigation by the Organised Crime and Corruption Reporting Project (OCCRP) found that the mines were in fact owned by the two daughters of Azerbaijan’s President Ilham Aliyev.
The protesters were objecting to pollution of the area by waste from the mines, which they state has caused significant damage to the health of local people.
Residents stated that a lake in the village, which has allegedly been used to drain acid and dump waste from the goldmines for around 11 years, was damaging the nature around it and emitting toxic fumes, making it hard to breathe and causing lung damage.
Protesters chanted and carried signs saying ‘natural waters are being poisoned’, ‘The River Kur is being poisoned’, and ‘people die of lung disease at the age of 50’.
They also voiced their objections to plans to construct a second artificial lake in the area.
‘The inside of [the first] lake is acid. It’s burned nature in a radius of 100 metres. In order to increase gold production, they are now building a second lake in the village’, one protester told journalists.
She added that this lake would be close to a river.
‘Can you imagine what that means? Nature will be destroyed as far as Shamkir, Tovuz, and Ganja.’
The protests continued for a second day on 21 June, with police obstructing efforts to resume protests on Thursday. On Wednesday night, police blocked roads to the village, which remain closed for entry and exit to all except for residents.
Residents told local media that ten protesters had been arrested in total on Tuesday and Wednesday, and that their relatives were not being allowed to meet them.
One woman told journalists that all of those detained at the protests were ‘imprisoned for 20 days’. She added that she was not allowed to visit her son, who had been detained.
On Wednesday afternoon, the head of Gadabay District, Orkhan Mursalov, met with the protesters but claimed that their concerns were unfounded and based on ‘disinformation’ spread on social media.
‘This grandmother is 78 years old’, said Mursalov, referring to one of the woman seen being pepper sprayed by police. ‘If the lake were poisonous, she wouldn’t be louder than me at this age.’
‘What do we know about the toxicity of cyanide? Who says it? This is disinformation spread on social networks.’
He added that there were currently over 50 pregnant women in the village, and the local administration had not received any ‘appeals’ from them regarding issues related to pollution.
He also stated that while he knew that some protesters had been injured the previous day, they had thrown stones at the police, which no one had the right to do.
On Wednesday, Azerbaijan’s Interior Ministry spokesperson stated that an investigation was being conducted into the use of pepper spray against one of the protest participants.
‘The police officer was overcome with emotion and committed a serious offence against the woman, and we accept it’, said Elhad Hajiyev.
However, he added that women taking part in the protests had made many ‘inappropriate statements and illegal actions’.
‘It is clear that the police officers showed high restraint and discipline towards those women’, said Hajiyev. ‘How many times have police officers been subjected to illegal acts unbecoming of an Azerbaijani woman? No special measures were applied against those women, nor was the issue of punishment raised.’
A Russian collapse following their defeat in Ukraine is inevitable, and when it comes, the Ingush are ready to forge their own future.
The words of the Marquis Astolphe de Custine — ‘Russia is a prison of peoples’ — is understandable to the Ingush from the first to the last letter due to our rich prison experience inside a country that has changed names and sizes many times, but has never changed its inhuman essence.
Over 250 years, the Ingush have survived one complete and three partial deportations, during which tens of thousands, a significant proportion of our population, perished in massacres and man-made famines.
The generals in tsarist Russia complained: ‘what right do these savages have to live on such a beautiful land?!’ Russian troops carried out countless punitive expeditions, razing villages and killing people in the thousands.
The communists even declared the Ingush to be enemies of the people, evicting everyone to the last to Siberia and Central Asia.
[Read on OC Media: Opinion | Russia’s death train rolls through Chechnya and Ingushetia]
The 21st century did not bring changes — and the Ingush met the Russians once again in the Chechen wars.
Still today, kidnappings by the security services, extrajudicial executions, and ongoing ‘special operations’ with victims both among civilians and members of the armed resistance continues.
Russia sent Ingush employees to law enforcement agencies to expand the ‘Russian World’ in Georgia, Crimea, and Donbas.
But the last straw for the Ingush was the Russian army mobilisation for the war in Ukraine, when it became apparent that Russia would not emerge victorious from this war, and that this would lead to another collapse of the empire.
The Ingush have already experienced two collapses of Russia in which unpreparedness led to chaos. This time, in December 2022, a group of Ingush emigrants living in Turkey, the EU, and the Middle East decided to prepare for the creation of their state, army, and authorities. On 13 December 2022, the Ingush Independence Committee was born in Istanbul.
It included several dozen people who decided to firmly unite Ingush people of all political views around the idea of developing a free independent state of Ingushetia after the collapse of Russia.
The names of the committee members, except for Ahmad Ozdo, who read out the declaration of independence of Ingushetia in the European Parliament, and press secretary, Ruslan Evloev, are kept strictly secret over safety concerns.
These concerns are not for the safety of the members themselves, but of their relatives in Ingushetia who would be abducted without fail. They would face torture, and, at best, be released after public curses and insults, at worst, their names would join the long list of the missing.
None of the committee came for fame or personal gain, because joining now there is only a risk to life.
All decisions in the committee are made collectively, not individually. A decision was also made to form the armed forces of Ingushetia — a general staff was created. It includes Ingush officers who took part in the war in Chechnya and Ingushetia. The process of creating military units is underway.
We have no illusions that the army of Ingushetia will be able to liberate the republic from occupation. The military is being created to protect the population of Ingushetia from external and internal enemies in the face of a gang of Wagnerites, Kadyrovites, and others who have already committed a vast number of war crimes in Ukraine. After the collapse of Russia, Ingushetia would likely be no exception.
Many mistakenly believe that the goal of the committee is to destroy Russia; there are no inadequate people who would believe that the smallest territorial republic has the strength to do this.
Russia cannot win the war in Ukraine, but neither Putin nor the Russian people can afford to lose, and they will fight to the last, that is, until their wholly corrupted country collapses. Russia will fall apart independently — anyone can deny this or pretend that nothing will happen anywhere, but not in the national republics.
Because the people of Russia who are alien to this war, who cannot study their native language in schools, who feel like second-class citizens in their country, now have to think about a future without Russia. They must now think about life without serving as cannon fodder for Russian imperialism, because their future is not in Russia, and not with Russia.
But even many of the ‘good Russians’ among those who oppose Putin and his regime do not want to hear and understand this.
So I debated with the Russian opposition within the walls of the Hudson Institute in Washington at the Free Nations of PostRussia Forum, where I was authorised to represent the Ingush Independence Committee.
They demanded to keep everything as it was — Russia within the borders of 1991. I have not heard what they will do with Abkhazia, South Ossetia, or Transnistria, but I believe there they will insist on the will of the people. Still, they consider any expression of the will of the peoples of Russia exclusively as ‘separatism’.
Neither the Kremlin nor the Russian opposition is willing to listen and accept that we, and thousands of others in Russia, are tired of them.
The most important thing that those ‘good Russians’ cannot understand is that for us, life under their domination in all spheres, with another state collapse every hundred years or so — this is not our choice.
And it is unlikely that you will find a people on earth who would like to live in a state where in one century, God and private property are abolished, in the next we are a stronghold of Orthodoxy with a leader richer than a hundred Arab sheikhs.
It looks like madness, but the Russian opposition is again promising us a ‘beautiful Russia of the future’ with the same zeal and passion with which the Bolsheviks promised communism a hundred years ago, and 200 years ago, the tsarist generals told us that a civilised life awaits us in a slave-owning empire full of blessings and prosperity.
The non-Russian peoples of Russia are unlikely to find common ground with the Russians, because the Russians need an empire, but we do not.
The Ingush, the Chechens, the Daghestanis, or the Yakuts with the Bashkirs are not interested and do not need the occupation of Crimea or Donbas, control over Transnistria, and neighbouring peoples who speak their language and celebrate 9 May.
Socially and culturally, Azerbaijan is closer and more understandable to us. We are closer to Georgia, where people think about a future vacation, repairing a house, or buying a new car, not about whether Wagner will capture Bakhmut and then how to celebrate this war crime as a victory.
The history of the Ingush in tsarist, communist, or ‘democratic’ Russia is one big criminal case against Russia in its crimes against the Ingush people, whose only fault is their unwillingness to die out or to be part of a state of the Russian people, obedient to the Kremlin.
The Committee of Ingush Independence today speaks from the side of civilisation, a normal economy, and the rule of law, which will have to be established in Ingushetia to replace the imperialism, corruption, and other components of the Russian world.
[Read more on OC Media: ‘Thousands’ of miners go on strike in Chiatura]
[Read more on OC Media: In pictures | Portrait of a mass hunger strike]
Gocha Surameli at the miners’ strike in Tbilisi (left, photo: Mariam Nikuradze/OC Media) and posing with the ‘Conscience Boys’ advocating the release of people arrested for the 5 July riots (image via Facebook).
