Fifteen Years - Time for Repentance

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For 15 years, every day on March 2, we come to the tombstone of the chief editor of the Monitor magazine Elmar Huseynov to pay tribute to his memory, his heroism and martyrdom in the name of free democratic Azerbaijan. This ritual action can be considered an act of solidarity, protest and disagreement with the policy of the authorities to suppress freedom of speech.

The killing of Elmar was dictated not only by the desire to eliminate the person, or to frighten others, but also the desire to kill freedom of speech in Azerbaijan.

With the assassination of Elmar, the next, toughest period of the destruction of independent media, the formation of a puppet information space, managed from high offices, began. But have the authorities reached their goal? Yes and no. Yes, because they destroyed the sprouts, which did not have time to grow after the first years of independence of the free press. The free spirit of journalism, barely free of the Soviet mentality, and only trying to take off, was destroyed. It was replaced by the squalor created by wretched officials - a likeness and a copy of themselves. This is not a subjective assessment of the author, this is an objective assessment of the society that boycotts TV boxes, newsstands with “Bakush” (Iranian cookies), and Internet recyclables. No, the Azerbaijani society said, involved in a large-scale movement on the World Wide Web for freedom of speech and freedom in the broad sense of its meaning.

Power is troubled. Everything goes wrong and worse. In the classrooms, they break laptops and heads about how to regain the trust of viewers, readers, two subjects, which the Internet has turned into a single symbiosis with an interactive appendage. But trust cannot return without acknowledging the priority of truth over the untruth that the information community has been fed with for 15 years.

The truth was shot on March 2, 2005, and with it the cry of the soul of a man trying to reach the top with his articles about the dangers that await Azerbaijani society and the state. They shot him, because they did not want to hear anything about the upcoming upheavals. But Elmar was right:

We have got economic, social, political and social crises, which can be combined into one single systemic crisis.

We have got the collapse of the feudal clan system, which hated him and was ready to destroy him.

We have got an information crisis in the face of a degraded press and a renaissance of public freedom.

We have got a moral crisis, when the obscene language touches not only the “family”, but also all the families in Azerbaijan.

Is Elmar guilty that fate chose him as the oracle, who the society listened to with all its heart and the power categorically rejected? His predictions came true and come true.

Fifteen years is an hour of repentance for customers and killers, it is repentance for the whole society, which could not save Elmar, and thus lengthened its path to freedom, which it proclaimed in 1991.