The recent scandal at RFE/RL Azerbaijan Service is not an isolated case — its an outcome of systematic mismanagement at senior level
It was a dream come true, walking past the security and into the fortress that was home to the Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty office in Prague on a cold and grey December morning in 2014. I was about to start the Vaclav Havel Fellowship and as were many aspiring journalists at the time, within our geography, RFE/RL was an institution where everyone wanted to work at.
A series of events and decisions in the course of my fellowship (including in the following years) gradually shifted my view of the radio in a completely different direction.
The raid and the radio’s response
Shortly after I started my fellowship, the RFE/RL Azerbaijan service was targeted by the government of Azerbaijan. The radio’s Baku office was raided, its journalists questioned, and equipment confiscated, marking the beginning of a long arduous battle. The service’s former bureau chief was arrested, and later sentenced on bogus charges.
It was then that I noticed cracks in the system. While I expected full support and solidarity from the senior managerial team of the radio, I saw instead power play of interests and arguments on full display. While I expected that the radio would evacuate everyone they could from the country, instead, only employees who were single were selected. The ones with families were selected for relocation based on the “needs” of the headquarters office in Prague.
Then, came the radio’s senior management decision to reassign, the head of the Azerbaijan Service to a different position within the radio. In many ways, when I think about all that is going on at Azerbaijan service right now, I think of that day, when this decision went into effect. Azerbaijan service was never the same on the day of that decision.
The newly appointed director was not a total stranger. He was with the service since 2004. But, he was often offensive in his language towards other members of the team, with a serious lack of experience and managerial skills. The decision to appoint this specific person as the new director of Azerbaijan Service was made behind closed doors and without consultations with other team members of Azerbaijan Service.
Gone was the language of mutual understanding, professionalism, and solidarity. In was the humiliating tone, of the new boss, who took his time to yell at the staff during morning meetings and who became even more toxic over the years.
If I was over the moon when I started the fellowship, I could not wait for the fellowship to end and for me to get out of that toxic environment.
Over the years, I kept hearing cases of bullying by the new boss. And over the years, no measures were taken against his sporadic, and frantic behavior.
I kept freelancing with the service and the newsroom until my contract was suspended in 2022. Lucky me, I was spared from all the traumatic experiences, unlike my former colleagues who remained at the radio having to put up with the neurotic behavior of the boss.
Beyond Azerbaijan service
In the meantime, the cases of mismanagement were not just at the Azerbaijan Service. Friends from other services would often complain and share their stories of mismanagement by the heads of their services. The amount of drama that went down, would have made for an excellent TV series, except all of this was happening in real-time, affecting real lives.
Over the years, BBG [Broadcasting Board of Governors]-USAGM [U.S. Agency for Global Media] Watch would also run stories showcasing examples of mismanagement, reporting mistakes by the various language services at the radio as well as over at Voice of America and hiring fiascos.
Former RFE/RL journalists were also vocal in their criticism of the top executives.
One example is Kazakh Service journalist Asem Tokayeva who in 2019 accused RFE/RL Tajik and Kazakh services of helping to promote propaganda in favor of authoritarian regimes. According to BBG USAGM Watch, “Tokayeva had lost her Kazakh Service editor job [in 2018] with RFE/RL as a result of a recent internal reorganization which she says was designed to get rid of the critics of the management like herself who have raised concerns about RFE/RL programs to various countries in Eurasia.”
But there were many other journalists who quit as a result of mismanagement at the radio.
It is worth mentioning that a lot of these issues also trace back to the leadership at the USAGM. Or lack of good leadership to put it mildly.
My letter to BBG
In 2018, I penned a letter addressed to BBG’s now-former CEO John Lansing condemning management practices when the radio’s (now former) president Thomas Kent and vice president Nenad Pejic, fired Dr. David Kakabadze, fired the director of RFE/RL’s Georgian Service.
I am writing to you as a former RFE employee. I was a Vaclav Havel Fellow and worked with Azerbaijani service. Being a big fan of the work produced by our service, joining the ranks of the RFE reporters was a great moment of pride for me.
But pride has faded, replaced by shame. Shame for seeing great journalists leave the radio; shame for not seeing more responsibility and ownership taken by the management for the people who put their life on the line and risk everything; shame for so many decisions that have had a negative impact on the radio and its journalists; shame for not speaking up earlier.
I witnessed first-hand the tough environment reigning through the RFE. The decision making process by the senior management often reminded me of some of the authoritarian countries where the Radio actually operates- the style of the leadership differed little. Perhaps my evaluation might be unjust, but perhaps the management should have made more effort in demonstrating this was not the case.
Because of this kind of leadership, I was frustrated with the way decisions were made and quickly realized that more often than not, it was about the people who managed the radio rather than the people who made this radio continue to deliver its services. Your recent decision to fire the head of Georgian Service David Kakabadze is not just outrageous but disrespectful to the person you have fired who have done just that- deliver, objectively, and independently- which is what we all do, as journalists.
Many hoped that changes within the leadership at RFE/RL over the years would change the toxic and dysfunctional environment reigning within the radio. That change never came.
Back to Azerbaijan Service
Five years after penning that letter, I wrote another one, this time, addressing RFE/RL’s acting president, Jeffrey Gedmin, asking him to address yet another fiasco, this time, at the Azerbaijan Service for RFE/RL.
One of the service’s talented, and long-term employees, Turkhan Kerimov, was laid off from work, on no valid grounds, without a warning, and replaced by a pro-Azerbaijani government journalist Mammadsharif Alakbarov. Alakbarov is notoriously known for his anti-Armenia posts which he widely and proudly shared on social media platforms during the 2020 Karabakh war. He has since suspended his accounts.
What is going on at @RFERL Azerbaijani service? Turkhan Kerimov, one of the best journalists who has been working for Radio Azadliq for many years, was fired. Turkhan, who broke many corruption stories from Azerbaijan like the one below, was replaced by pro-government propagandists, wrote Azerbaijani journalist Habib Muntezir on Twitter.
It was not just Turkhan who was dismissed from his position, however. At least four other journalists were fired in the course of the last two years, and no one at the senior level questioned this decision. Others resigned in protest.
This is all the outcome of impunity being on full display — the kind of impunity familiar to many of the journalists working at RFE/RL given some of the political contexts in countries where RFE/RL is active.
Meanwhile, despite staff raising the issue with HR, no measures were taken.
As such, Turkhan’s dismissal is a problem of a much bigger scale. The tweet defending the director of the service from the official RFE/RL Twitter account is a testament to that:
In response to this weakly-worded tweet, several of the Azerbaijan service’s former employees issued the following statement [edited for clarity]:
We, the undersigned, former employees of Azadliq Radiosu (Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, RFE/RL Azerbaijani Service), who a few days ago shared posts on our social media accounts about the problems we faced at the Radio during the years of employment, express regret for a primitive and two-sentence statement of the Azerbaijani Service.
We would like to know how our claims were investigated in one day and how it was concluded as “ill-founded”?
Additionally, we state that we have no enmity toward Azadliq Radiosu, our concerns relate to the head of the service, Ilkin Mammadov, line editor Vusala Alibeyli, and editor-in-chief Zeynal Mammadov.
We shared posts on our social media accounts last week (02.08.2023), where we noted that there is serious dissatisfaction with the managers. Employees are being mistreated, threatened and harassed. Those who protest face revengeful attitudes, are being laid off, or put in such a situation that they would leave themselves.
The complaint letter written to the HR by Islam Shikhali, who personally cooperated with the Radio, went unanswered, and his claims were not investigated. Furthermore, complaints made during this period and after that by the employees of the Azerbaijani Service of the Radio at the Prague office to HR were also ignored.
As a result of the mismanagement of the Azerbaijani Service and their mistreatment of the employees, professional and independent journalists left the Radio.
The purpose of this statement is to express what is happening at the Azerbaijani Service of Radio Liberty and to target those who are trying to completely eliminate the already dismal media environment in Azerbaijan.
We have made the problems quite clear in our posts, but RFE/RL has not given a coherent answer, nor has it initiated any investigation to resolve these issues. Therefore, we once again present some examples of mismanagement that occurred in the Azerbaijani Service of the Radio:
- When we shared examples from other media outlets regarding the treatment of employees, we were told: “Is it good there? Go work there!”
- Ilkin Mammadov often used the following words to describe the collaboration we had with the radio: “We have entered into bed with you” and “We have entered into marriage with you”. Several times he brought some employees, working both in the Prague office and in Baku to the point of crying;
- The equipment leased to the employees is used as a tool for threat. But it was unclear in what form and how much payment would be received; in some cases, the equipment was denied all together, citing Radio rules;
- Not all employees have a right of holiday entitlement, only the main staff is offered this privilege. Moreover, you can use this vacation only on the date indicated by the management. It is impossible to select or change the time. Employees are not properly informed whether the payments for the leave have been provided or not;
- There are no preventive or protection mechanisms in place for reporters as well as the people being interviewed. When the interviewees face problems, the editors refuse to help, and leave the reporter to their own devices. In the case, there are issues with state institutions, officials or experts, Ilkin Mammadov either expects the reporter to resolve the problem, or often responds: “If I talk, I’ll get into a fight, so if they don’t respond to you later, take the blame on yourself.”
- Despite us being freelance reporters, we are often forced to adapt to new work format, which is decided in the Prague office [in the absence of consultations with the local staff]. These changes are sporadic, which reduces the productivity of employees, and impcats their skills. From time to time, reporters are left with no other choice but to get involved in technical or logistical duties, which fall outside of their responsibilities. This includes issues such as arranging for the transportation of the old office equipment, being a courier and etc.;
- In general, they claim that the employees who voiced the problems are “incompetent” and “lazy”, and that they are conducting a defamation campaign against the Radio. If these employees were incompetent or lazy, how could they cooperate with this institution for 8–10 years? The editors who in the past commented “excellent” on every prepared report, cannot accuse those employees for incompetence now. The reality is that management has very seriously minimized productivity by demoralizing, psychologically oppressing and threatening employees. Additionally, as a punitive measure, the employees who raise concerns are prevented from working on their pitches; these pitches are either not approved, or receive impossible demands, making the delivery of the final story, unattainable, and therefore, get lost in the pile of rejected pitches. Other employees working in the Prague office are instructed not to work with “problematic employees” in Baku;
- Instead of answering to the accusations raised, the management is hiding behind the limitations that the Radio generally faces;
- Many of us who worked and have now left our jobs in Baku have been pressured by the security forces. We were tortured, detained, our houses were searched, our equipment was confiscated, we have given statements at police stations and the prosecutor’s office;
Taking mentioned points into account, we demand:
1. An independent financial investigation in the Baku office of Radio’s Azerbaijani Service regarding the last 8 years. We demand our claims investigated effectively and transparently;
2. An investigation into allegations of ill-treatment, disrespect, bullying, harassment of those who question the management’s activities, and allegations of favoritism against former and current employees in the Prague and Baku offices of the Radio’s Azerbaijan Service;
3. That these investigations are conducted in an independent, effective and transparent manner and the results areshared with the public;
We call on RFE/RL, whose mission it is to promote democracy and free media, to support journalists whose rights have been violated and to investigate their complaints. We call on the US Congress to question transparency and expenditures at the Radio, which is financed by the US tax payers;
We once again call on the human rights institutions, organizations which defend free speech and media in Azerbaijan and around the world to pay attention to the issues raised by us and to do their best to protect ourcolleagues, who remain at the Radio and are still under the threat of being humiliated, insulted, and fired from their jobs.
Signatories:
Islam Shikhali
Ravan Seyfulla
Orkhan Rustamzadeh
Arzu Aliyeva
Ramin Deko
My question is whether we are actually going to see changes within the management of the radio or if it's going to be business as usual — just as we often see happen in autocratic regimes, where leaders get away with what they do to their own people. Will RFE/RL prove that it's different? It is hard to say at this point.
