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Forged in Fire: The Making of an Investigative Reporter
BY DON RAY
Khadija Ismayilova knew she didn’t have to go to prison. But in her mind, her only other option was to exile herself from her native Azerbaijan.
Over the past decade, the investigative reporter and commentator forRadio Free Europe/Radio Liberty (RFE/RL) and regional coordinator and partner for the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project (OCCRP), had been shaking things up by exposing government corruption.
More recently, she was zeroing in on the activities of President Ilham Aliyev and his friends and relatives. She has said that she never set out to target them; their names just kept cropping up in her investigations.
Along the way, she started getting clear warnings —warnings other journalists might have heeded. Ismayilova knew that they were telling her to keep her nose out of places it didn’t belong.
But for her, running wasn’t an option.
So after returning from another of her frequent foreign trips — trips in which she spread the word about the crackdown on journalism and human rights in her country — she plunged back into her investigative reporting.
The more she dug, the clearer the picture became. Her investigations documented the outright plundering of the Azerbaijani treasury. She was uncovering a major league money grab. Based on her ongoing investigations, the First Family and its cronies seemed to be leveraging personal control of the former Soviet state’s transportation system, banks, government mining operations and more.
The more she uncovered and reported, the more the government tried to close off the access to key information. When that didn’t stop Ismayilova, the threats of personal attacks began — outrageous, demeaning and humiliating attacks.
Ismayilova told them she wouldn’t stop, so they followed through by releasing hidden camera video of her most intimate moments.
The ploy backfired, however, and turned public sentiment in her favor, she said.
Next they arrested her on what her employers, supporters and leading journalism organizations consider to be ludicrous, trumped-up charges.
Death of an investigative journalist
Nearly a decade earlier, it had been the assassination of another journalist that awakened the then-28-year-old reporter and inspired her to devote her life to exposing corruption, consequences be damned.
“My colleague, Elmar Huseynov, he was killed,” Ismayilova said. “He used to publish a very critical and independent magazine, ‘Monitor,’ which highlighted high-level corruption cases and the President’s family being involved in corrupt practices.
“So he was killed at his own doorstep.”
Ismayilova admits that, up until that time, she had been critical of Huseynov’s work. She says his stories were not balanced and he rarely verified what he was publishing as fact.
“I was so snobbish about what he was doing,” she said, “because I was coming from this high standard journalism — English language journalism. Sometimes his stories were not well done in terms of standard American journalism.”
But on Wednesday, March 2, 2005, she says she came home, switched on the television and watched a flash news report.
Someone had shot and killed Huseynov.
“At that moment, I remember it changed everything in my mind,” she said. “I was shocked. I didn’t know what to do.
“That was the moment when I felt guilty. I started crying — I just couldn’t control it. I couldn’t stop crying.
“I felt responsible. I felt it’s my fault as well. We killed him.
“He was a great journalist — very brave,” she said. “He was the only one who was doing this brave journalism.”
She says she realized that, unlike the kind of work she had been doing, Huseynov had been working on topics that were much more difficult to report. He had tried his best to get all of the key documents to prove his stories, but often failed, she said. Ismayilova now realized that the proof was not that easy to get.
“But he was telling the truth to people,” she said, “which I didn’t do because it was too difficult to do.”
Ismayilova picks up the torch
That’s when she says she vowed to help pick up where Huseynov had left off, to raise the standards of journalism and to learn better ways of documenting the corruption.
She found that help, in part, through OCCRP. Editor Drew Sullivan says Ismayilova attended just about every training session the international investigative reporting consortium offered.
“She was working for the English-speaking Caspian Business Daily,” Sullivan says, “and I was impressed. She was at ease working with documents and records, and she was able to understand complex business deals.”
Sullivan says he came to notice how tremendously motivated she was.
“It wasn’t long before I knew we had to bring her on board,” he said, “and she’s been a thorn in the side of Azerbaijan’s First Family ever since.”
Until 2009, Ismayilova says, the media were still very quiet in Azerbaijan because of continued attacks on reporters who were writing critical stories. But that year, she says, she began helping Washington Post writer Andrew Higgins work on a story about the president’s children owning expensive real estate properties in Dubai.
“When this story was published and it came from the Washington Post, we started discussing it, and it stopped the silence — it broke the silence,” she said. And, she said, nobody denied that the children owned the property.
“Before that, we had journalists saying, ‘Oh, this government, president — they are thieves.’ It was all their own opinions — never facts. And now we had facts to talk about — facts to refer to.”
A newspaper from the United States had done what local journalists had not. “And then I thought, why is it that a Washington Post correspondent is doing that, and we cannot?” she said.
A new kind of reporting for Azerbaijan
This kind of reporting was unprecedented in Azerbaijan, she said. She and her fellow reporters learned from OCCRP how to fish for offshore companies connected to the Aliyev family.
Right away, they reeled in a big one of their own.
Ismayilova and her colleagues started digging into bank privatization records relating to the state airline company. They discovered that, in the mix of privatization, one of the president’s daughters ended up being one of the owners of a bank. As private citizens, they could receive money and properties that otherwise would be illegal for the President, himself, to receive.
In August, 2010, Ismayilova and fellow reporter Ulviyye Asadzadebroke the story.
“They broke the law to become a bank owner,” Ismayilova said. “We published this story, proving every sentence there.”
Indeed, they proved that Arzu Aliyeva, the president’s daughter, was one of the owners of Silk Way Bank. The bank was part of a larger, recently privatized company that enjoyed a near-complete monopoly over every aspect of airline service businesses including the airline catering company, the airport taxi service and even the job of maintaining the planes and helicopters.
It wouldn’t be the last time Ismayilova would follow the money and find one or both of the president’s daughters at the other end of the trail.
“It’s not that I’m chasing them,” she said. “No, I’m not chasing them. It’s just that, wherever I dig, they pop out of the documents — their names pop out of them.”
There was no comment from the government about Arzu Aliyeva’s interest in Silk Way Bank. However, the Aliyev regime began trying to silence the voices that weren’t under its control.
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