Azeris rethink post-freedom tilt to West
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By Kathy Gannon
ASSOCIATED PRESS
Published May 13, 2006
ASTARA, Azerbaijan — After the Soviet Union collapsed and Azerbaijan
became free, the oil-rich country was caught in a tug of war for
influence between the secular, democratic West and Islamic Iran. Iran
sent in preachers, built mosques and gave scholarships to the
poor. But Azerbaijan turned to the West.
Nowadays, however, the early rumblings of political Islam are being
heard in the world’s biggest Shi’ite Muslim republic outside Iran,
aroused by frustration with rampant corruption, intractable poverty,
and a sense thatfor the sake of oil, the Western democracies have
chosen to ignore the taint of corruption in its elections.
There are many signs that neighboring Iran is capitalizing on the
discontent with a “we-told-you-so” message and winning some support in
its confrontation with the West over its nuclear program.
Ilham Aliyev, who took over as president from his dying father in 2003
in an election sullied by claims of widespread fraud, visited the
White House last month, underscoring his friendship with the Bush
administration. But many in Azerbaijan wonder how long his
overwhelmingly Muslim nation of 9 million people will stay in the
U.S. orbit.
“Azerbaijan will not become an Islamic country overnight, but the
beginnings are here,” said Arif Yunusov, author of “Islam in
Azerbaijan” and chairman of the Institute of Peace and Democracy, an
independent think tank in Baku, the capital.
“People today in Azerbaijan don’t believe America. People believe that
the West does not want democracy in our country, it just wants our
oil.”
Europe admired Whether an Islamic surge is coming is open to
question. Azerbaijan also has a strong Western-oriented camp, yearning
for Europe’s model of good governance and civil rights.
In the cosmopolitan capital, the overwhelming affinity is with Europe,
though attendance at mosque prayers is growing steadily, and human
rights workers say they were surprised at how many young Azeris joined
the demonstrations that swept the Muslim world over the publication of
Danish cartoons mocking the prophet Muhammad.
In the more conservative southern regions that border Iran, the return
to Islamic roots is more noticeable.
Azerbaijan is a “very complex country,” said Fariz Ismailzade, a
political science professor in Baku. “We have modern girls, but still
there is a rise in Islamic fundamentalism. It is slow but it is
happening.”
Azeris, says secular opposition politician Eldar Namazov, are “the
most European of people in the Islamic world — even more than
Turkey. Yet I think you can say today that we see some Islamic
renaissance, and the ground is ready for an Islamic revival here in
Azerbaijan. … Our society wants political change, but year after
year people are disappointed with democracy.”
More than a decade after signing a multibillion-dollar oil deal with a
U.S.- and British-dominated consortium, most of this country the size
of Maine is miserably underdeveloped. Nearly half the population
earns less than $1,000 a year. Unemployment hovers around 20 percent.
Oil revenues rising Azerbaijan anticipates oil revenues of $160
billion by 2025, and a $4 billion, 1,093-mile pipeline is pumping
Caspian Sea oil from Baku through Georgia to the Turkish Mediterranean
port of Ceyhan. Yet outside Baku, gas supplies are erratic and the
country runs on dilapidated Soviet-era infrastructure.
All this, say critics, adds up to a new opening for Iran, the Shi’ite
giant to the south.
“Iran has always been active in Azerbaijan, but before they weren’t
getting the results they wanted,” said Mr. Yunusov, the
researcher. That’s changing; “Now people think that Iran’s words make
sense, that the claims by Iran against the war in Iraq and against
America are not so bad, that the West just wants our resources.”
Iran is reported to be financing Azerbaijan’s opposition Islamic
Party.
Among Azeri refugees from the 1990s war with Armenia over the enclave
of Nagorno-Karabakh, Iran is the biggest provider of humanitarian aid,
and itgains points from a perception among the refugees that
Azerbaijan was betrayed from all sides during the war and that the
West has forgotten them.
Iranian television and radio, broadcasting in the Azeri language, are
the leading sources of information here in Astara and elsewhere on the
southern border. Azeri-language talk shows in the nearby Iranian city
of Tabriz are flooded with callers from Azerbaijan.
“Everything we want to find out, we find out from Iranian radio,” said
Mammadov Mazjtajab, a former reporter with Radio Liberty in
Astara. Broadcast propaganda has increased, much of it directed
against the United States, he said.
Increase in propaganda Mr. Mazjtajab said propaganda has increased
noticeably during the nuclear standoff.
Tehran has threatened to strike back at any country that cooperates
with an attack on its nuclear facilities. Azerbaijan’s government has
promised that its territory won’t be used for military action against
Iran, but people living nearby are nervous, pointing to a U.S.-built
radar facility just outside Astara and the upgrading of the airport at
Nakhichevan, also on the borderwith Iran, to accommodate NATO
jets. Both projects are U.S.-financed.
Iran’s perceived attractions are revealed in an encounter at the
border with Jamilya Shafyeov, an Azeri woman wearing three sweaters
against the cold and bemoaning her inability to find work. “I think
things are so much better over there,” she said, gesturing through a
small gray steel gate that opens into Iran. “What do we have here?
Nothing. No jobs. If I had a passport I would go there.”
Nail Farziyev, a retailer in Astara, drew cheers from fellow
shopkeepers when he said: “We can’t turn our back on Iran and we won’t
turn our back on them.
“Why is it that America thinks it can impose its will on everyone?” he
asked. “Why can’t Iran have peaceful nuclear energy? I want to know
why.”
In Baku, nearly 150 miles to the north, Mr. Yunusov’s think tank is
sampling opinion nationally and discovering similar sentiments.
Opinions are shifting In a survey he did three years ago, he said: “I
asked about Iraq and Afghanistan, and then everyone supported the
United States and everyone agreed that [Osama] bin Laden was behind
the September 11, 2001, attacks.”
But in a new survey he is conducting with the University of
Minnesota’s Department of Political Science, he said, “it is all
changed now. Some even say maybe the United States planned the
[September 11] attacks in order to go after Muslim countries to get
their oil.”
In Nadaran, 40 miles from the starting point of a pipeline regarded as
an engineering marvel, Hajji Vagif Gasimov hunkered down in a
municipal office with bitterly cold wind whistling through broken
windowpanes. “Our situation is getting worse from day to day,” he
said.
“My father was an oil worker, my grandfather was an oil worker. We are
surrounded by gas pipelines and we have no gas. We think that this is
America’s fault because they want all our resources.”
In the 1990s, he said, “my dream was to have a democracy like the
United States. Now we don’t say we are against democracy — we are
against America’s democracy now.”
No one thinks an Islamic takeover is imminent. The Turkish Foreign
Ministry says it welcomes good relations between Azerbaijan and
Iran. Azerbaijan is one-twentieth the size of Iran, but some Turkish
analysts think that giventhe large ethnic Azeri population in Iran,
Baku may have more influence over its neighbor than vice versa.
Confrontation feared “There are plenty of reports that Iran has helped
encourage greater religious devotion,” said Bulent Aliriza, a Turkish
analyst with the Washington-based Center for Strategic and
International Studies. “The failure of the secular opposition to the
Aliev regime … has allowed the development of a religiously inclined
opposition. But I think for the moment it is manageable. The question
is, what will happen if there is a confrontation between Iran andthe
West? This will make life very difficult for Azerbaijan.”
Rafik Aliyev, a government official charged with managing religious
harmony in the country, said the corruption claims are exaggerated and
he sees no big protest vote for Islamic parties.
He sees Iran’s influence as both natural and worrying — an open
border, propaganda broadcasts, Azeri students being educated in
Iran. “Of course all these things can increase religious sentiment and
we have been thinking about these issues and taking some measures.”
The measures, he said, include a countrywide refurbishing of
infrastructure that has increased electrical supply to the south, and
establishment of Islamic teaching institutions to propagate a moderate
brand of Islam.
Mr. Namazov, the secular politician who was a powerful aide to
Azerbaijan’s late President Heydar Aliyev, said the Islamic Party made
gains in his Baku constituency in the disputed November parliamentary
election, while secular opposition parties won only a handful of
seats.
He said that when he met with European and American ambassadors
afterward, he told them: “It is true there is no danger today of there
being an Islamic government here, but in five years, if we still have
this system of total corruption, unemployment and severe human rights
violations, then Islamic representatives will be elected.”
© AP correspondent Louis Meixler in Ankara, Turkey, contributed tothis
report.
Copyright © 2006 News World Communications, Inc. All rights reserved.
From: Emil Lazarian | Ararat NewsPress
