Azerbaijan and democracy

A watermelon revolution?

Jun 2nd 2005 | BAKU
>From The Economist print edition

AP

Not likely, says Azerbaijan’s president

AS HIS capital, Baku, swelters, Ilham Aliev should be sweating. He
inherited the presidency from his father, Heidar, after a flawed
election in 2003. Parliamentary elections are due in November.
Azerbaijan is as corrupt as almost anywhere on the planet. The parallels
with pre-revolutionary Georgia, Ukraine and Kirgizstan are painfully
clear. So is Mr Aliev nervous? “No”, he says firmly.

Why not? Because, he declares, his regime is more popular than those of
other ex-Soviet countries, and because the opposition is discredited by
violence in 2003, and by its association with the government before his
father, a Soviet-era boss, returned in 1993. “I am a new generation,” Mr
Aliev says, glossing over his dynastic succession. His country also has
energy. A new pipeline will pump oil from the Caspian Sea to Turkey via
Georgia. This may explain why the West has tolerated the Aliev clan’s
excesses. (Rumours of possible American military bases in Azerbaijan are
denied by Mr Aliev.)

“We do not have human-rights abuse in our country,” says the president,
cracking his knuckles. But Elmar Mammadyarov, the foreign minister
admits that the police were over-zealous when violently breaking up a
street demonstration on May 21st. International watchdogs have
documented a string of dreadful police and judicial abuses. The big
difference in Ukraine, says Isa Gambar, who claims to have beaten Mr
Aliev in the 2003 election, was that its leaders were persuaded not to
use force. Ali Kerimli, another opposition leader, says that, for
Azerbaijan’s sake, the West must now be stern with Uzbekistan over its
massacres last month.

The oil also makes it easier to grease palms and secure loyalties.
Baku’s bureaucrats are said to receive two salaries: paltry official
ones, and cash supplements. For ordinary folk, oil revenues seem to
offer the chance of a share in the narrow prosperity evident in Baku’s
designer shops and Mercedes-crowded streets. Yet the lesson of Ukraine
and Kirgizstan is that revolutions can strike even apparently stable
regimes.

If Mr Aliev stays on, there are two prognoses for Azerbaijan’s future,
resting on contrasting assessments of his personality. The optimistic
version is that he means what he says about creating a middle class,
tackling corruption and using oil revenues to diversify the economy,
much of which collapsed with the Soviet Union. By the time Azerbaijan’s
share of Caspian oil runs out in about 20 years, the 40% of the
population living in poverty will have been lifted out of it. And Mr
Aliev may, in time, replace the old-school cronies he inherited from his
father with modernisers.

The gloomier version is that, for all his talk of media impartiality and
against corruption, Mr Aliev has kept on the old elite because he agrees
with them. The oil money will be wasted, and the country’s gaping
inequality will widen. Radical Islam may encroach from Dagestan to the
north or Iran to the south. Or oil may finance the reconquest of
Nagorno-Karabakh, a bit of Azerbaijan seized by Armenia in the 1990s.
“Every patience has limits,” says Mr Aliev. Bellicose talk puts pressure
on Armenia. One day, the threats may even be fulfilled. They certainly
appeal to angry Azeris: Karabakh comes up in conversation almost as
often as Heidar Aliev’s image appears on plinths and in portraits.

A small test of direction will be an opposition rally this weekend. A
bigger one will come with the November election, for which Mr Gambar, Mr
Kerimli and others are trying to unite. If he could overcome the usual
post-Soviet neurosis about elections, there would probably be little
cost for Mr Aliev in allowing the free vote that he says he wants. Can
he?