RFE/RL Azerbaijan: Foreign Minister Says Democracy Is A Work In Progress
Wednesday, 21 July 2004

By Annie Bang and Michelle Townsend

Elmar Mammadyarov is the Azerbaijani foreign minister. He was invited to
the United States by Secretary of State Colin Powell for his first visit
as foreign minister. The minister spoke on 20 July at his only public
appearance in Washington at the Center for Strategic and International
Studies, a public policy and research organization.

Washington, 21 July 2004 (RFE/RL) — Mammadyarov said building a strong
democratic state is extremely difficult, especially in a poor country
like Azerbaijan.

“This is a process and we are moving in this process,” Mammadyarov said.
“It doesn’t mean that we are frozen in our position.”

Mammadyarov, who was appointed to President Ilham Aliyev’s cabinet in
April after serving as ambassador to Italy, suggested one good step
toward economic progress would be building up the country’s energy sector.
“Sometimes it’s very difficult to explain and sometimes it’s very
difficult to understand to some people who didn’t visit there, that
didn’t live there, that it is not an easy task to build a Western-style
society.”

He stressed that Azerbaijan is committed to transparency in its spending
of oil and natural gas revenues.

With its State Oil Fund, Azerbaijan is following British Prime Minister
Tony Blair’s launch in September 2002 of the Extractive Industries
Transparency Initiative, which aims to ensure the transparency of funds
being paid to states by companies.

Mammadyarov said he is optimistic about contract negotiations over the
natural-gas market among European countries and his country’s near
neighbors.

“This will be also very, very important for the development not only of
Azerbaijan, but the whole region, because it gets the access to the
European market for the gas from Central Asia,” Mammadyarov said.

Some members of the audience questioned the Azerbaijani government’s
commitment to democratic change.

The South Caucasus country has come under criticism for crackdowns on
the political opposition and irregularities in last year’s election of
Ilham Aliyev, the son of Heidar Aliyev, who ruled the country —
directly or indirectly — for nearly 30 years.

The topic put Mammadyarov on the defensive: “Sometimes it’s very
difficult to explain and sometimes it’s very difficult to understand to
some people who didn’t visit there, that didn’t live there, that it is
not an easy task to build a Western-style society,” he said.

The foreign minister also responded to a question about anti-Armenian
propaganda by the Azerbaijani press, saying his country’s media was free
to criticize Armenia or any other country.

Armenia and Azerbaijan have been engaged in a years-long dispute over
the enclave of Nagorno-Karabakh, which has a largely ethnic Armenian
population but which is officially part of Azerbaijani territory.

“If we will start to prohibit that because of the interest of anyone, we
have to stop our democratic reforms. We have to stop and change our
course, and this is not the case in Azerbaijan,” Mammadyarov said.

Critics say Azerbaijan has made some progress toward a freer media but
that it has a long way to go.

From: Emil Lazarian | Ararat NewsPress