EX-AZERI LEADER BEGGED FOR APARTMENT
By Anatoly Medetsky
Staff Writer
Aida Sultanova

The Moscow Times, Russia
June 9 2006

The first president of independent Azerbaijan, Ayaz Mutalibov, had
to beg the Kremlin for an apartment after he fled a rebellion in 1992.

Mutalibov left Baku aboard a Russian military plane just three months
into his term. He is wanted in Azerbaijan on charges of negligence
for an Armenian attack in February 1992 that killed hundreds of
Azeris. Baku also accuses him of involvement in a coup plot in 2001.

Mutalibov, who dismissed the accusations as “political intrigue,”
said by telephone that one of the first things he did upon arriving
in Moscow was to ask the Kremlin for a home.

The Presidential Property Department provided him with a state
apartment in 1994, but he was not allowed to register there and had
to apply for a new guest visa every 45 days, Mutalibov recalled. The
government finally donated a four-room apartment to him and his family
in 1997, in the remote district of Zhulebino, where he still lives.

In 1999, then-President Boris Yeltsin granted him the status of
political refugee, and only at the end of last year did he receive
a refugee card allowing him to travel abroad, Mutalibov said.

Despite the apartment problems, Mutalibov said he remained a friend
of Russia. “We think that relations with Russia are a priority for
Azerbaijan because we are neighbors that have long lived as a single
country,” he said. “We are linked by a lot of things — for example,
the fact that about 2 million of my countrymen live here.”

During Mutalibov’s short term as president, Azerbaijan joined the
Commonwealth of Independent States, a loose group that replaced the
Soviet Union.

Mutalibov said Russia had never tried to use him to influence
Azeri politics and that he had not sought the Kremlin’s support for
his political ambitions. He heads the Social Democratic Party of
Azerbaijan, which does not have any seats in the Azeri parliament.

Still a citizen of Azerbaijan, Mutalibov said he hoped to return to
his home country.

“It is a disgrace that the first president of Azerbaijan has to live
abroad,” he said.