Moscow Times
June 20 2005

20,000 March in Azerbaijan

Jeyhun Abdulla / Reuters
By Aida Sultanova /AP

Azeri police below a billboard of late President Heidar Aliyev on
Saturday.

BAKU, Azerbaijan — About 20,000 opposition protesters chanting
“Freedom!” marched across Azerbaijan’s capital on Saturday, pushing
for free parliamentary elections this year and urging the government
to step down in the biggest protest in years.

The demonstration, the second such rally in as many weeks, was
organized by three leading opposition parties, which formed the
Azadlig, or Freedom, bloc to run for parliamentary elections set for
November.

Tension has been building steadily in this oil-rich nation in advance
of the elections, leading some observers to predict that Azerbaijan
could see a massive uprising similar to those that toppled unpopular
regimes in Georgia, Ukraine and Kyrgyzstan during the past 18 months.

Supporters of the Musavat party, the People’s Front of Azerbaijan and
the Democratic Party of Azerbaijan chanted “Freedom!” and “Free
Elections!” and carried pictures of U.S. President George W. Bush
with the words: “We want freedom!”

The opposition bloc has chosen orange as its campaign color, the
color used by the Ukrainian opposition during the so-called Orange
Revolution. Many participants in Saturday’s rally wore orange
T-shirts and baseball caps and carried orange flags.

Several hundred followers of Ilgar Ibragimoglu, a dissident imam who
was evicted by the authorities from a mosque in Baku, joined in the
protest on Saturday after reading a prayer.

The opposition demands election law reforms and access to
state-controlled television.

“People won’t tolerate election fraud,” Ali Kerimli, the leader of
the People’s Front of Azerbaijan, told the rally.

He and other speakers said a change in government was necessary to
win back control over Nagorny Karabakh, a disputed enclave that has
been under the control of Armenian separatists since the early 1990s.