During a meeting with International Committee of the Red Cross Baku representative Mary Werntz, Eldar Makhmudov, chairman of the Azerbaijani State Commission on POWs, missing persons and hostages and a national security minister, said 1,357 Azerbaijanis were freed from Armenian captivity in 1998-2004. He also claimed that Azerbaijan had testimony about another 783 people being held captive in Armenia.
He noted that 4,852 Azerbaijanis had been missing since the beginning of the Armenian-Azerbaijani conflict over Nagorno-Karabakh, an Armenian enclave in Azerbaijan that Baku lost control over in the late 1980s and early 1990s.
According to the survey 40% of the respondents cited unemployment, 13% cited low standards of living, 6% cited imperfect social protection and 6 % cited economic problems as the largest problem facing Azerbaijan.
Fifty-four percent of the respondents described the current economic situation as good or very good, 48% expected it to improve next year and only 7% expected it to get worse.
According to the poll, 46% of respondents think that democracy had been established in the country, 20% did not think Azerbaijan had a democracy and only 37% were aware of their civil rights.
Forty percent of the respondents said the ruling party, Eni Azerbaijan, reflected the interests of citizens more completely than other political parties.
Sixty percent of the respondents said the Azerbaijani judicial system was no impartial. According to the respondents the most corrupt aspects of society were medicine and education. Interestingly, Russian surveys produce the same results. This is a common problem for all newly independent post-Soviet states.
Twenty-five percent of the respondents said they would vote in the municipal elections on December 17, while 33% said they might vote.
According to the respondents, the main source of information in the county is television. In terms of popularity, 51% of the respondents watched Russian television channels and 49% watched Turkish stations. The most popular newspapers, the opposition newspaper Eni Musavat and the Russian newspaper Zerkalo were each read by 7% of the respondents.
The poll also showed that young people, 18-25, were inadequately informed about politics and economics.
