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In Azerbaijan, there has been a lot of sensitivity over the country's international reputation during the inaugural European Games. So people were pleased when James Bonar, ostensibly a tourist from London visiting to watch the first European Games, was effusive in his praise for the country on commercial pro-government Azerbaijani television station LiderTV. The country is wonderful, and food is delicious to boot, he said, according to BBC.

Raw footage later posted online showed Bonar coming across very differently. He had a thick accent and a very poor command of English - in other words, whoever he was, he was clearly not a British tourist. The footage was viewed thousands of times on Facebook and prompted huge discussion online, BBC reports.

"Even if he's fake," tweeted @HasaNahid, "at least he should have tried to do a British accent." Another commented: "Sometimes I'm ashamed of being from this country, when I see and hear things like this.”
But while some suspected the interview with the fake British tourist was a bit of misleading propaganda, others were more forgiving, according to BBC.

According to RFE/RL, pro-government television station in Baku, Lider TV, claims it was duped by a local man who "misrepresented himself as a foreigner" at the European Games in Azerbaijan in order to create a "provocation."

The statement from Lider TV comes amid allegations that Azerbaijan's government has hired locals to pretend they are foreign sports fans at the first-ever European Games in order to bolster the image of the competition as a successful international event. A Lider TV report on purported foreign fans went viral on social media in Azerbaijan after Meydan TV -- an independent, Germany-based online TV channel -- identified a man interviewed for the story as Seymur Seferov, an Azerbaijani citizen, RFE/RL writes.
In the report, Lider TV named the man as "James Bonar" and said he was an "English tourist" who was attending this month's European Games in Azerbaijan. Seferov began his English-language interview by telling Lider TV: "I am coming from London, but I live here now." However, Lider TV's voiceover translation into Azerbaijani said only, "I am coming from London" -- omitting Seferov's statement that he is a resident of Azerbaijan, RFE/RL points.

According to the American website The Daily Beast, Emin Milli, the managing director of independent Meydan TV, said clever social media sleuths at Meydan found Sefarov’s original Facebook page, where he is dressed exactly the same as he was for his Lider spot, a channel owned by one of Azerbaijan president Ilham Aliyev’s cousins. Another fake testimony was aired on ANS TV, another pro-Aliyev outlet, when a vacationing Russian says that he’s been to Hawaii and the archipelago has got nothing on the glorious Caspian Sea, a body of water where most of the aquatic life has disappeared due to overfishing and pollution—120,000 tons of sludge per year dropped by oil tankers, by one estimate. “People started to ridicule the government’s stupid idea to fake even tourists,” Milli told The daily Beast.

The propaganda campaign to drum up support for the Olympic European Games is fuel for memes, according to the article. Caricaturist Gunduz Aghayev, for instance, published a cartoon showing grey, drab Azerbaijanis being put through a metamorphosis machine and coming out beamish citizens of rich European nations, ready for their close-ups on state-friendly television. The photographer Mehman Huseynov created his own parody news segment in which he pretended to be German journalist freshly arrived in Azerbaijan to proclaiming it paradise. “He starts saying that human rights are violated grossly in Germany, that the police are beating up people, that his own apartment in the center of Berlin was destroyed and he was not properly compensated—and he shows photos that actually were taken in Baku,” Milli points.