Analysis: The Azerbaijani journalist behind the erroneous picture of Sweden's corona management

On March 17, it rang on my Facebook page. A friend and colleague in Uzbekistan had shared an article with me entitled "Sweden refuses to fight the corona virus. This virus does not harm people. " Is this true, my friend wondered.

The quote in the title was said to come from Swedish researchers. Furthermore, a plethora of factual errors about Sweden's (non) management of the corona crisis followed. The article also roughly incorrectly quotes the Swedish-Polish triathlete Joanna Soltysiak.

It wasn't long before other Russian-speaking friends started sending me the same article, or copies of it from other sources. A few days later, Defense Minister Peter Hultqvist went out and warned that foreign powers were spreading information about Sweden's handling of the corona virus.

The article was first published by Haqqin, a site that claims to be an information channel for the independent organization "For Human Rights". It got huge spread. On Facebook alone, it had 280,000 interactions, making it one of the most shared articles about Sweden ever in Russian-language media.

Behind the site stands Ejnulla Fatullajev, an Azerbaijani journalist whose biography would work well for a novel. 

Once upon a time, he co-edited two major opposition newspapers in Azerbaijan and a well-known democracy fighter, but disapproved by the regime. In 2007, Fatullaev was sentenced to prison for defamation and terrorism. Many international organizations fought to get him released. Amnesty International classified him as a prisoner of conscience and he received a prestigious freedom of speech award from UNESCO. 

In 2011, Ejnulla Fatullaev was pardoned by Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev. When he was released he had made a political coup. The new, faith-based attitude and tributes to the president, known for the constant violation of human rights, caused Amnesty and many other human rights organizations to distance themselves from Fatullaev.

He himself claimed that he had begun to see clearly during prison time and now went on a fierce attack on the democracies of the Western world in his new publicist creation, Haqqin. 

The couple Arif and Leila Yunus are opposition human rights activists from Azerbaijan who now reside in the Netherlands. In their book "From the Soviet Camp to Azerbaijan Prison" (2018), they describe Ejnulla Fatullajev as one of Azerbaijan's most scandalous and provocative journalists.

According to the couple, Haqqin was created by the head of the country's security service, Madat Gulijev, but is today governed by the presidential administration. The articles about the West are, in practice, commissioned works from Russia, Yunus says, pointing out that the writers behind these always carry Russian names, while the other articles are written by Azeris. 

Journalist Joshua Kucera has interviewed about twenty politicians, journalists and diplomats about Fatullaev and his site Haqqin. Like the Yunus couple, he describes how no one in the Azerbaijani elite wants to be associated with Fatullaev because of his bad reputation. At the same time, Haqqin is well-to-do in Azerbaijan, as Fatullajev has good insight into power and thus a good track of the latest political intrigues and the country's relations with the outside world.   

The erroneous and hard-angled article, that Sweden renounces the fight against the corona virus, could be interpreted as a reaction to criticism of some kind from Sweden against the regime in Azerbaijan, or Russia. More recently, Haqqin's main narrative has been to dirty the EU.

After repeated attempts to contact Ejnulla Fatullajev by e-mail and facebook, there is still silence. However, the discussion on Sweden's handling of the corona crisis continues, and on the question of all my Russian-speaking friends, who wonder if Sweden really relinquishes the fight against the corona virus, the answer had to be a series of more fact-checked texts on the subject.