About ABA TV

ABA TV

ABA TV was an independent private television station in Baku, Azerbaijan, launched in 1999 and closed in 2001. Its life was short — roughly two years on air — but it became one of the most fully documented cases in the history of Azerbaijani broadcast freedom, because its end was recorded in detail, and in near real time, by the Committee to Protect Journalists, by ARTICLE 19 and by Freedom House. ABA TV went off the air on 17 July 2001, after months of scrutiny by tax officials, the arrest of its finance chief, and the seizure of broadcasting equipment worth about 320,000 United States dollars. Its president announced the closure in a videotaped message sent from the United States, saying he had closed the station to protest a Tax Ministry investigation that he viewed as a government-orchestrated attempt to take control of it. Because the station is closed, this entire profile is written in the past tense, as the record requires. ABA TV did not fade away for lack of an audience in any account that survives; it was a functioning Baku station, notable enough to have become the first in Azerbaijan to broadcast daily licensed CNN newscasts translated into Azerbaijani, and its closure reduced the number of independent stations in the country at a moment when press-freedom organisations were counting them carefully.

Launch and place in Baku television

ABA TV was launched in 1999, in the first decade of Azerbaijan's independence, when private television in Baku consisted of a small group of stations operating alongside the state broadcaster. Reference listings of television in Azerbaijan record ABA among the private channels, launched in 1999, headquartered in Baku and defunct in 2001. Contemporary media assessments of the period named the capital's private television companies as ANS, Space TV, Lider, ABA and Azad Azerbaijan, most of them with limited areas of coverage compared with the state channel, which was received throughout the country. ABA TV therefore belonged to the formative generation of Azerbaijani private broadcasting: stations created after the Soviet period, working with limited reach, dependent on licences and official tolerance, and operating in a capital city of a country of about eight million people. The surviving sources say little about the station's founding arrangements, its original owners beyond its president, or its day-to-day schedule, and this profile does not invent those details. What the record does show is a station that, within about two years, had built enough of an operation to attract international programming arrangements, political attention and, finally, a tax investigation that ended it.

Programming and the CNN newscasts

The clearest documented fact about ABA TV's programming is also its most distinctive one. ARTICLE 19, writing to the Azerbaijani president in July 2001, noted that ABA TV had recently become the first station in Azerbaijan to broadcast daily half-hour licensed CNN newscasts translated into Azeri. That single sentence carries considerable information about the station's ambitions. A licensed arrangement, rather than unauthorised rebroadcasting, implies a formal relationship with an international news provider; translation into Azerbaijani implies a newsroom capable of adapting international material for a local audience; and a daily half-hour slot implies that international news held a regular place in the schedule rather than appearing as an occasional filler. In another documented episode, the Committee to Protect Journalists' account of the year 2000 recorded that ABA TV was suspended for two weeks in October 2000 because it had offered airtime to opposition politicians and had refused to cooperate with a high-ranking official who had offered his patronage in exchange for help launching a new television station. That earlier suspension matters to the programming story as well: the station's willingness to give opposition figures airtime was part of its editorial identity, and it was already in conflict with officials a year before its final closure. A Journalists' Trade Union report from October 2000 described ABA as an independent entertainment television station, a reminder that, like most small private channels of its era, it was a general service rather than a pure news channel, even though news — domestic political access and translated CNN bulletins alike — is what brought it into the international record.

The October 2000 shutdown threat

ABA TV's final crisis had a rehearsal. On 5 October 2000, the station's president, Faiq Zulfuqarov — his first name also appears as Fariq in some English-language reporting — officially announced that the Azerbaijani government had decided to shut down his station. According to his account at a press conference that day, the Minister of Communications, Nadir Ahmedov, had told him the ministry was shutting the station down, although the minister had not yet submitted any official papers to that effect. Zulfuqarov said he believed the presidential apparatus had ordered the closure. He further alleged that Ali Hassanov, the head of the presidential apparatus's socio-political division, had offered to put the station under the government's unofficial control, that he had rejected the offer, and that he expected Hassanov would soon confiscate ABA TV's equipment for a new station, to be named Azad Azerbaycan, which was shortly to begin broadcasting. Hassanov denied Zulfuqarov's claims and threatened to take him to court over the accusation. The station survived that autumn — it was still broadcasting in 2001 — but the episode established the pattern that the 2001 sources would repeat: a closure presented by the station as political control by another name, and presented by officials, when they addressed it at all, as something else. It also gave the later tax investigation a context that international observers did not ignore.

Tax scrutiny and the arrest of Shamil Safiyev

For several months before its closure, ABA TV was the subject of intense scrutiny by tax officials. The human centre of that scrutiny was Shamil Safiyev, the head of the station's finance department — described in some accounts as its chief financial officer — who was arrested on 22 May 2001 on charges of tax evasion and the intentional use of false documents, and who remained in jail through the station's closure and beyond it in the reporting of that summer. The Committee to Protect Journalists, in its letter of 27 August 2001 to President Heidar Aliyev, urged a prompt, thorough and fully transparent investigation into the Tax Ministry's possible abuse of authority and asked for more information about the inquiry. ARTICLE 19 likewise said it had strong reasons to believe that the seizure of the station's equipment was related to efforts by the government to exercise greater control over ABA TV, and argued that confiscation of valuable equipment vital to a media outlet's operation is never justified in the course of a tax investigation. The Azerbaijani authorities' position, as reflected in the charges themselves, was that the case concerned tax evasion and false documents. This profile records both the charges and the objections to them, as the sources present them, without purporting to decide a tax case that the surviving English-language record does not resolve.

Closure: 16 and 17 July 2001

The end came in the middle of July 2001. ABA TV's president, Fariq Zulfuqarov, had been living in the United States for more than two months when, on 16 July, he announced the station's closure in a videotaped message sent to his employees. In an interview published on 18 July in the Baku newspaper Echo — rendered Ekho in some reporting — Zulfuqarov said he had closed the station to protest the Tax Ministry's investigation, which he viewed as a government-orchestrated attempt to take control of ABA. On 17 July 2001, ABA went off the air, according to local and international news reports. At approximately 1:00 a.m. on the night of 16 to 17 July, Tax Ministry officials seized two trucks containing ABA television equipment, which station staff members were apparently moving out of the station in an attempt to save it from confiscation. The equipment was said to be worth 1.5 billion manats, about 320,000 United States dollars. Sources in Baku told the Committee to Protect Journalists that the Tax Ministry was holding the equipment until it finished investigating alleged financial improprieties at the station. ARTICLE 19's letter of 20 July 2001 put the seizure at the same value and date and described it as following the president's announcement of a temporary closure on the evening of 16 July; Zulfuqarov, in a later press release, claimed he had been forced to cease operations as a result of pressure by the Azerbaijani authorities. The word temporary in that first announcement is the only hint in the record that the closure might have been reversed. It was not: reference listings record 2001 as the station's final year, and no source consulted for this profile documents any return to air.

The licence problem

Alongside the tax case, ABA TV faced a licensing vulnerability that it shared with other independent Azerbaijani broadcasters of the period. ARTICLE 19 noted that, in common with other independent broadcasters, ABA TV had been unable to obtain a licence for its operating frequency, its previous broadcasting licence having expired in June 2001 — the month before it closed. The same letter recalled that in February 2001 ARTICLE 19 had written concerning the closure of two other independent stations, TV DMR and TV Mingechevi, for not holding official licences to operate, despite having attempted to apply for such licences for a number of years. The Committee to Protect Journalists' reporting on 2000 added that seven regional television stations had been unable to obtain broadcast licences, some after waiting as long as three years, while officials stalled their applications. A station broadcasting on an expired licence, in a system where renewal was not forthcoming, was exposed: any dispute with the authorities took place against the background fact that its legal right to its frequency was unresolved. ABA TV's closure was executed through tax enforcement and equipment seizure rather than through a licensing decision, but the expired licence formed part of the precarious legal ground on which the station stood in its final weeks.

International reaction

The reaction to ABA TV's closure was swift and is the reason the case remains documented in such detail. ARTICLE 19 wrote on 20 July 2001, within days of the seizure, expressing concern and framing the case under Article 10 of the European Convention on Human Rights — Azerbaijan being a member of the Council of Europe — which protects the right to receive and impart information without interference by public authority. The Committee to Protect Journalists wrote on 27 August 2001, describing the government's unrelenting harassment of the station, and its annual reporting classified the case under harassment and censorship. Freedom House's Freedom in the World 2002 survey recorded that in July the independent ABA TV station announced its immediate closure because of continued pressure by the state authorities, and placed the closure within a wider intensification of the government's campaign against independent media during 2001. ARTICLE 19 also supplied the starkest measure of the closure's significance: it reduced the number of independent stations in Azerbaijan, a country of eight million people, to twelve — a poor comparison, the organisation said, with a total of one hundred independent broadcasters then operating in Georgia and Armenia, whose combined populations amounted to seven million. Whatever view is taken of the tax charges, that arithmetic explains why a small Baku station's end drew letters addressed to a president.

ABA TV in its wider context

ABA TV's fate was not an isolated event in Azerbaijani media history, and the sources that document it insist on the pattern. The Committee to Protect Journalists placed ABA alongside Sara Radio/TV, which officials had shut down in October 1999 after it broadcast an interview with an opposition leader and which was effectively liquidated in February 2000 when officials seized transmitters and equipment worth about 120,000 dollars, and alongside ANS, which the government had attempted to censor in July 2000 after it aired an interview with a Chechen rebel leader. Freedom House recorded that in the months after ABA's closure, several independent newspapers were ordered to cease publication or were forced to close by heavy court fines, and that journalists protesting restrictions on press freedom were beaten and arrested at demonstrations in November and December 2001, before a year-end amendment of the mass media laws limited the government's power to shut down newspapers or strip accreditation. In July 2001, the same month ABA closed, a presidential decree created a national media council whose members would be appointed or approved by the president and which would hold wide powers, including authority over broadcast licensing. ABA TV thus closed at a hinge point: the period in which Azerbaijan's post-independence private broadcasters, licensed uncertainly and watched closely, were being brought within a tighter state framework.

Legacy and the limits of the record

ABA TV's legacy is disproportionate to its two years of broadcasting. It is remembered in the international record for three things: for the translated CNN newscasts that made it, briefly, a bridge between international television news and an Azerbaijani audience; for the October 2000 confrontation in which its president said publicly that unofficial government control had been offered and refused; and for a closure so thoroughly documented — dates, names, sums of money, the hour of a night-time seizure — that it became a standard citation in surveys of press freedom in Azerbaijan at the turn of the century. The limits of the record should be stated as plainly as its contents. No verified information survives in the sources consulted about the station's full programme schedule, its audience size, its advertising business or the eventual legal outcome for Shamil Safiyev, and the station left no official website or archive from which such details could now be recovered. Its name can also cause a small archival confusion: the president's first name appears as both Fariq and Faiq in English-language sources, and the station appears variously as ABA, ABA TV and ABA Television. Those variants refer to the same Baku station. What is certain is the outline: launched in Baku in 1999, suspended once in 2000, investigated through the spring of 2001, and closed on 17 July 2001 under government pressure, as the Committee to Protect Journalists concluded at the time — a closed chapter of Azerbaijani television that this directory records in the past tense because the station never returned.