Azerbaijan: RFE/RL Website Experiencing Access Problem in Baku

Internet users in Azerbaijan began experiencing problems accessing Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty's Azeri-language website the day after the news service posted its coverage of a Washington Post story about alleged real estate transactions involving the children of Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev, the head of the station's Azerbaijani service tells EurasiaNet.

The Washington Post reported on March 5 that three Azerbaijani citizens with the same names and birth dates as President Aliyev's adolescent son, Heydar, and daughters, Leyla and Arzu, had purchased $75 million-worth of luxury properties in Dubai, the financial capital of the United Arab Emirates.[For additional information click here].

Responding to The Washington Post article on March 8, Ali Hasanov, head of the presidential administration's Political and Public Affairs Department, told Azerbaijani journalists that no law prevents members of the presidential family from taking part in commercial activities, the state-run APA news agency reported.

RFERL's coverage of the story resulted in hundreds of user comments on its Azeri-language website. The day after posting its coverage, Azadliq Radio, the Azeri-language service for the US-government-funded broadcaster, started receiving reader complaints about difficulty in accessing the site, RFE/RL Azerbaijani Service Director Kenan Aliyev told EurasiaNet.

"Starting from Saturday, March 6, users of our websites -- azadliq.org and azadliqradiosu.az - [began] experiencing problems with access via different internet providers and on mobile phones in Azerbaijan," Aliyev told EurasiaNet. "We haven't located the source of the problem, but we can say that problems accessing our site began after we posted an article [about the real estate transactions] originally published by the Washington Post."

RFE/RL technicians have been able to determine that the problem accessing Azadliq lies with Internet Service Providers (ISPs) located inside Azerbaijan, RFE/RL Azerbaijani Service Director Aliyev added. The service's two sites -- azadliq.org, operated from RFE/RL's headquarters in Prague, and azadliqradiosu.az -- remain fully accessible to users from outside Azerbaijan, he continued.

Subscribers to almost all of Azerbaijan's main ISPs -- Bakinternet, Azeronline and Uninet -- have either been unable to access Azadliq Radio, or have had only intermittent access, the pro-opposition news agency Turan reported on March 9.

The website plays a critical role for the US-government-funded news service, which lost its access to Azerbaijan's national FM frequencies in 2009. [For background see the Eurasia Insight archive].

Azadliq Radio representatives have communicated their concerns about access to Internet providers, which have promised to resolve the issue, Aliyev said. He added that he was reluctant to jump to conclusions about the cause of the disruption. "We asked local Internet providers in Azerbaijan to explain this unusual problem to us," he said. "We continue to monitor the situation."

Several Internet users in Azerbaijan reached by EurasiaNet late on March 9 said that they receive a message that the Azadliq URL is not functioning when they try to access the site. One Bakinternet user said that he was redirected to a list of other sites.

Bakinternet and other Internet providers were not immediately available to comment on the access matter.