Two people were detained in Azerbaijan’s capital Baku on November 26 over an attempt to stage a march celebrating the 108th anniversary of the October Revolution.
The detention came two days after a pro-government media outlet Qafqazinfo shared a video footage of a group of people marching with the flags of the Soviet Union and Azerbaijani USSR in Baku’s Nizami district to commemorate the October Revolution. The video of the march went viral in social media. Ibrahim Asadli and Abdulla Ibrahimly were identified by the Interior Ministry as organizers of the march and detained. Criminal charges were initiated against them.
“A preliminary investigation revealed that these individuals rented an office with the support and funding of another state, operated as part of a group, and periodically held meetings,” Qafqazinfo wrote. The media outlet did not disclose which country had funded the group.
Furthermore, the during the raid on the participants’ offices and apartments, numerous materials, including flags, copies of books promoting radicalism and communism, CDs, and other electronic devices, were found and confiscated, according to the report.
This was not the first crackdown on a march related to Soviet heritage. EArlier in May, the former chair of the Imishli District Council of Elders, Saleh Samadov, was detained after speaking during an event commemorating the Soviet Union’s victory over Nazism in World War II. Samadov had attended the event holding a Soviet Union flag and wearing the St. George ribbon - a symbol of the Russian Empire. According to Okhu.az, the Imishli District Court remanded Samadov to four months of pretrial detention on separate charges of tax evasion.
