About Bakı Xəbər

Bakı Xəbər

Bakı Xəbər, rendered in English-language sources as Baki Khaber, Baki Khabar, Baki Kheber and Baki Xeber, and translated as Baku News, is an Azerbaijani-language daily newspaper published in Baku, the capital of Azerbaijan. International press-freedom organisations consistently classified it in the early 2000s as an opposition daily, one of a small group of Baku newspapers that criticised the authorities and reported on contested politics at a time when most of the Azerbaijani press was government-owned, government-aligned or cautious. Its name in international reporting is inseparable from two episodes in 2003 and 2004: the arrest of one of its journalists after he was sent to cover post-election demonstrations in Azadliq Square, and the kidnapping and beating of its editor-in-chief, Aydin Guliyev, in July 2004. Those episodes, documented by Reporters Without Borders, the Committee to Protect Journalists, Human Rights Watch and IFEX, are the main reason the paper is known outside Azerbaijan at all.

This profile states an important limit openly at the start. The founding record of Bakı Xəbər is thin. No reliable source consulted for this profile establishes the year the newspaper was founded, the identity of a founder beyond its documented editor, or an independently verified circulation figure, and none of those details is invented here. What can be verified is substantial enough on its own: the paper existed as an opposition daily by the presidential election of October 2003, it was refused printing by the state printing works in the aftermath of that election, its staff were detained, beaten or insulted while covering elections in 2003 and 2005, and its editor was still being quoted under the same title by Azerbaijani news agencies as a political expert in 2018, 2019 and 2020. The sections below follow only that documented record.

Name, Language and Place in the Baku Press

Bakı Xəbər is published in Azerbaijani and is based in Baku. The variation in its English spelling is a matter of transliteration, not of different newspapers: Azerbaijani Latin script uses letters that English-language wire services and press-freedom groups have rendered in several ways over the years, so the same title appears as Baki Khaber in Reporters Without Borders reporting, as Baki Khabar in reporting by the Committee to Protect Journalists, and as Baki Kheber or Baki Xeber when its editor is quoted by the Azerbaijani news agency Trend. In every case the reference is to the same Baku daily whose name means Baku News.

Within the Azerbaijani newspaper landscape of the early 2000s, Bakı Xəbər belonged to the opposition camp alongside titles such as Azadliq, Yeni Musavat, Khurriyet and Yeni Zaman. That grouping matters because the pressures documented against the paper were rarely applied to it alone. When the state printing works refused opposition titles after the 2003 election, Bakı Xəbər was named in the same list as Azadliq and Yeni Musavat. When journalists protested in Baku in February 2004, they demanded the release of journalists from more than one opposition paper at once. Understanding Bakı Xəbər therefore means understanding it as part of a small, exposed opposition press sector rather than as an isolated newsroom.

Editorial Leadership Under Aydin Guliyev

The editor associated with Bakı Xəbər throughout its documented history is Aydin Guliyev, whose surname also appears in transliteration as Gouliev and Quliyev. Reporters Without Borders, the Committee to Protect Journalists and Human Rights Watch all identify him as the paper's editor or editor-in-chief in 2003 and 2004, and Trend reports in 2018, 2019 and February 2020 still identify him as editor-in-chief of the newspaper. That continuity is one of the few firm structural facts available about the paper: across at least a decade and a half of international references, the same editor stands at its head.

Guliyev's role was not only managerial. In the crisis episodes described below he was the paper's public voice, explaining to international organisations why his journalist had been in Azadliq Square, denying that his newspaper had published material against Islam, and telling the Azerbaijani press, in a later dispute over printing debts, what the paper owed and what it was prepared to pay. Still later, Azerbaijani agencies quoted him not only as an editor but as a political expert, invited to comment on foreign policy and on the conflict with Armenia. No verified source consulted for this profile names a separate founder, publisher or owner for the newspaper, and no such names are supplied here.

Coverage: Politics, Human Rights and Elections

The seed description of Bakı Xəbər, confirmed by the pattern of international reporting about it, is that of a daily covering politics and human rights. Its journalists were present where Azerbaijani politics was most contested: at the demonstrations that followed the presidential election of 15 October 2003, at polling stations during that election, and again at polling stations across Baku districts during the legislative elections of 6 November 2005. Election coverage was plainly a core part of its work, and it was precisely that work that repeatedly brought its staff into confrontation with police and polling-station officials.

The paper also criticised the authorities. That point does not rest on inference alone. After he was kidnapped in July 2004, Guliyev told reporters that he believed the government had orchestrated the assault to intimidate him and to punish his paper for criticising the authorities, a belief reported at the time by the Associated Press and recorded by the Committee to Protect Journalists. A newspaper does not attract that kind of stated suspicion, or that kind of attack, for neutral reporting. Its opposition identity was recognised by every international organisation that wrote about it, and the editor's own later statements show a newsroom engaged argumentatively with questions of state power, protest and political rights.

After the 2003 Election: Printing Refused and a Journalist Jailed

The first documented crisis came immediately after the presidential election of 15 October 2003, which was followed by clashes in Baku on 15 and 16 October. Reporters Without Borders recorded that, beginning on 17 October, the Azerbaijan state printing works refused to print five opposition newspapers: Azadliq, Yeni Musavat, Bakı Xəbər, Khurriyet and Yeni Zaman. The printing management said the papers owed too much money, but Reporters Without Borders noted that the works continued to print government and pro-government newspapers that were just as indebted. The same reporting described a further squeeze in November, when the opposition newspapers could not be published from 14 to 20 November because of a shortage of newsprint, after the only privately owned printing works willing to print them had exhausted its stocks, and editors accused the authorities of artificially creating the shortage by doubling the price of newsprint.

The human cost for Bakı Xəbər was the imprisonment of its journalist Sadig Ismailov. Reporters Without Borders, in its 2004 annual report, recorded that Ismailov was arrested in Baku on 30 December 2003 and accused of involvement in the clashes in the city after the 15 October election. Guliyev told the organisation that he had sent Ismailov to Azadliq Square on 16 October to cover the demonstrations. On 31 December the Nasimi regional court ordered Ismailov detained for three months in Bailov prison while the case was investigated, on charges under articles 220.1 and 315 of the criminal code, carrying between three and seven years in jail. Reporters Without Borders added, carefully, that there was no evidence he was being detained because of his work as a journalist. Human Rights Watch later recorded that, on 11 February 2004, journalists who had been refused permission to protest against the arrests of Ismailov and of Yeni Musavat editor Rauf Arifoglu went ahead anyway, were beaten by police as they approached the General Prosecutor's office, and saw four of their number arrested, tried on petty charges of insubordination, fined and released.

The July 2004 Attack on Aydin Guliyev

On 17 July 2004, Guliyev himself was attacked. The accounts assembled by Reporters Without Borders, the Committee to Protect Journalists and IFEX, drawing on the Turan news agency, agree on the core facts. Four masked assailants stopped the editor-in-chief near his house late in the evening, forced him into a minivan or minibus, and drove him around Baku for more than two hours. His hands were tied with rope, he was gagged, and a bag or plastic bag was put over his head. The attackers insulted and threatened him, threatened to kill him if he did not stop criticising Islam, and accused him of carrying out anti-Islamic propaganda through Bakı Xəbər and of being disrespectful to Azerbaijan's statehood.

Guliyev, who is Muslim, rejected that stated motive. He said his newspaper had never carried articles against Islam, and that he believed the accusations were a cover for the real reasons for the attack, which could well have been ordered by the government in retaliation for the paper's criticism. He also said he had been receiving telephone threats for around ten days before the abduction, and he appealed to foreign embassies in Baku to provide asylum for himself and his family, saying Azerbaijan was no longer a safe place for his family to live. Reporters Without Borders called on the interior minister, Ramil Usubov, to ensure the assailants were found and punished and to protect Guliyev. The Committee to Protect Journalists recorded that, by the end of 2004, the authorities had made no progress in the investigation into the attack.

Election Reporting and Pressure in 2003 and 2005

The attacks and arrests of 2003 and 2004 were not the only documented interference with the paper's election work. Reporting on the October 2003 presidential election itself, Reporters Without Borders recorded that Mushfig Mamedli, a correspondent of Bakı Xəbər, was detained by police in Baku while journalists across the country were beaten, arrested and ejected from polling stations. Two years later the pattern repeated during the legislative elections. In a statement dated 9 November 2005, Reporters Without Borders protested after journalists were harassed while covering the 6 November 2005 legislative elections, and named three journalists of the daily Bakı Xəbər among those beaten or insulted: Nabi Alishev in the 36th district of the Hatai region, Habiba Abdulla in the 26th district of the Sabunchi region, and Ruslan Bashirli in the 20th district of the Narimanov region.

Those three names matter for a profile of this kind. Most Azerbaijani newspapers of the period are documented, if at all, only through their editors. Bakı Xəbər is unusual in that the international record preserves the names and the working assignments of ordinary correspondents as they were obstructed in three separate Baku districts on a single election day. Together with Ismailov's assignment to Azadliq Square and Mamedli's detention in 2003, that record shows a newsroom that sent reporters out across the capital to observe voting and protest at first hand, and whose reporters paid a personal price for doing so.

Money, Printing and Debt

Like other Azerbaijani opposition newspapers, Bakı Xəbər operated inside an economy of print that the state largely controlled. Reporters Without Borders described how opposition journalists said the state distribution company Qasid regularly held back copies of newspapers it was supposed to distribute and held back proceeds from sales, and how police harassed street vendors and confiscated newspapers. Human Rights Watch, examining the same period, noted that the state printing press answered to the Presidential Administration and that it agreed in January 2004 to resume printing the opposition newspapers. For a daily dependent on a state printer, a state distributor and newsprint whose price could double, editorial independence carried a direct financial risk.

A later episode, reported by Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty and carried by AzerNews, shows the debt question following the paper for years. The staff of what the report called the debt-plagued newspaper Bakı Xəbər began a two-week vacation, and Guliyev insisted the vacation was not connected to the debt problem, while confirming the paper owed 17,000 manats to the state publishing house and was ready to pay half of the debt. The same report noted that President Ilham Aliyev had signed a decree in 2006 writing off various newspapers' combined accumulated debts of some 400,000 manats to the state publishing house. No verified circulation or revenue figure for Bakı Xəbər was found for this profile, so the paper's finances can only be described through episodes of this kind, not through numbers that do not exist in the record.

Later Visibility as Political Commentary

Bakı Xəbər did not disappear from the record after 2005. In October 2018 Trend quoted Guliyev, still as editor-in-chief and as a political expert, praising a statement by President Ilham Aliyev and his handling of the conflict with Armenia, and commenting on German Chancellor Angela Merkel's August 2018 visit to Baku and the importance of her statements on the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict. In other Trend reports carried by AzerNews and Today.Az, he commented on the Sumgayit events of 1988, on Armenia's participation in the Francophonie, and, in February 2020, on the Munich Security Conference panel between President Aliyev and Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan, which he described as a demonstration of Azerbaijan's position and a diplomatic defeat for Armenia.

Readers should hold those later reports alongside the earlier ones without this profile forcing them into a simple story. The documented record shows a paper classified as an opposition daily, and an editor who said the government had him beaten for criticising it, in 2003 to 2005; and the same editor, in 2018 to 2020, quoted by state-aligned agencies in strongly supportive comments about the president's diplomacy. What happened inside the newsroom between those periods is not documented in the sources consulted here, and this profile does not speculate about it. The later quotations do, however, establish one firm point: the newspaper and its editor remained active and publicly recognised well into a second decade after the events that first brought them to international attention.

Significance and the Limits of the Record

Bakı Xəbər matters less for its size, which cannot be verified, than for what its documented history reveals about Azerbaijani journalism after independence. In the space of three election cycles its journalists were sent to a square where demonstrators clashed with police, detained, beaten at polling stations, refused printing by the state works and squeezed by debt to a state publishing house, while its editor was kidnapped, bound, gagged and threatened in a minivan in the capital. International organisations treated those events as tests of whether Azerbaijan would tolerate a critical press, and the paper's name survives in their annual reports for that reason.

The honest conclusion is a double one. On the facts that can be verified, Bakı Xəbər was a real, working Azerbaijani-language opposition daily in Baku, led by Aydin Guliyev, covering politics, human rights and elections under sustained pressure, and still active as a source of political commentary many years later. On everything else a conventional newspaper profile would normally state — a founding year, a founder, a circulation, a full staff list, a detailed account of its present print and online operations — the public record consulted for this profile is silent, and this profile leaves those questions open rather than filling them with invention. No official website for the newspaper was included in the batch listing for this profile, and none is claimed here.