THE AZERI TRIANGLE
by Netty C. Gross
The Jerusalem Report
July 10, 2006
Israel and Diaspora Jewry are deepening their own links with
oil-rich Muslim Azerbaijan and helping the Azeri regime win friends
in Washington. Critics scoff at talk of democracy in this Central
Asian republic and see the specter of neighboring Iran clouding the
rosy picture.
On a crisp spring morning in mid-May a delegation of Israeli
dignitaries and Russian Jewish functionaries gather solemnly in
the pristinely landscaped national cemetery in Baku, the capital
of Azerbaijan, an oil-rich former Soviet Muslim republic in the
southeastern Caucasus region of Western Asia. As required by Azeri
state protocol, the delegation is beginning its two-day visit by laying
wreaths at the monumental tomb of Heydar Aliyev, the late Azerbaijani
leader. A Soviet-era strongman and chairman of Azerbaijan’s Communist
party, Aliyev reinvented himself as a pro-Western pragmatist after the
country won independence in December 1991, and served as president
from 1993 until his death in the United States, where in 2003, he
had gone for medical treatment after collapsing of a heart attack on
Azeri television.
This kind of homage to the leader is hardly surprising. Though he has
been dead for three years, billboards around the country of 8 million
are plastered with images of the beaming, clean-shaven, tanned face
of Aliyev, who looks on the posters a lot like Giorgio Armani.
Schools and parks are also named for Heydar Baba (Grandfather
Heydar). Critics say that the cult of his personality reflects
Azerbaijan’s lingering totalitarian orientation, that the country is
not a real democracy and that corruption and political repression
are rife; supporters counter that Aliyev was genuinely popular,
and that his regime stabilized the country and oriented its foreign
policy toward the West.
The itinerary also requires a visit to Martyrs Alley, a run-down
cemetery a 10-minute drive away, where guests are given red
carnations to place on the graves of some 132 young Azeris, including
an 18-year-old Jewish woman named Vera Bessantina, all innocent
bystanders killed in 1990 by Soviet troops sent in to put down unrest
in the tumultuous dying days of the Soviet Union. The end of the
crumbling Soviet empire also triggered war between newly independent
Azerbaijan and (Christian) Armenia over the disputed area known as
Nagorno-Karabagh, a predominantly ethnic Armenian enclave within
Azerbaijan. The 1992-94 war claimed 30,000 lives; Azerbaijan lost 20
percent of its territory to Armenian occupation, and 800,000 Azeris
were displaced. Nagorno-Karabakh has declared its independence, but
the enclave and territory conquered in the war remain under Armenian
control, and have become the major issue on Azerbaijan’s agenda.
Taken together, the two cemetery stops offer a glimpse into
Azerbaijan’s psyche. And what they represent are at the root of a
strong Azerbaijani-American-Israel-Jewish connection, a relationship
that some critics warn will unravel just as Israel’s romance with
Iran did, and for similar reasons. The connection benefits everyone.
In a world thirsty for oil and plagued by Islamic fundamentalism,
energy-rich Azerbaijan has become an important U.S. strategic ally
and partner in the war on terror in a region where Washington has
few friends. Baku solidifies the link by allowing the U.S to use its
airspace, and contributing troops to coalition forces in Iraq. To
underscore the political trade-offs, Ilham Aliyev, Heydar’s son
and successor, was invited to the White House for the first time
last April. Israel, too, is deeply interested in consolidating its
relations with this secular oil-rich Muslim state, which was once home
to an ancient Jewish community, most of whose members, some 80,000,
have since emigrated to Israel and Russia. And Israel has seen it
in its interest to encourage U.S. Jews to take up the Azeri cause in
the Washington corridors of power, at the same time reinforcing the
notion held by many Azeri and others in the Third World that the way
to Washington leads through Jerusalem.
There are other players as well: rich and influential Russian Jewish
businessmen, some of whom have powerful contacts from the old Soviet
days – and who proudly point out to me that Ilham’s son-in-law has
a Jewish mother and a Muslim father.
Azerbaijan also sees the good relations with Israelis and Jews as
reinforcing the image of a tolerant Muslim country. But Dr. Asim
Mollazade, chairman of the Democratic Reforms Party, one of a handful
of opposition parties, warns that Azerbaijan "is corrupt, and the
enormous oil revenues are not reaching the people, who remain very
poor. Those who can, emigrate. Islamic extremists are a great danger.
Azerbaijan is Iran circa 1975." The U.S., Israel and Jewish supporters,
he maintains, will be "deeply disappointed. They are fighting the
wrong fight."
The charges, though disputed, are not entirely unfounded. Azerbaijan
got a poor score for corruption, political repression and prisoner
mistreatment in a recent State Department report. And though Heydar
Aliyev assured president Bill Clinton in 1997 that he would work
to make Azerbaijan more democratic, his son, Ilham, now 45, was
elected president in 2003, two months before Heydar died, garnering
a too-good-to-believe 75 percent of the vote in balloting marked
by allegations of serious irregularities. Elections in 2005 for
the125-seat Azerbaijani National Assembly (the Milli Majlis) were
similarly marred.
But the United States, Israel and Diaspora Jews have chosen to ignore
the warnings, and these days, the apocalyptic scenario is a minority
opinion. "Mollazade’s views are myopic," says Israel’s ambassador to
Azerbaijan, Arthur Lenk.
In recent months, a parade of several high-level Israeli and Jewish
delegations, who have been mobilized to help Azerbaijani interests
in the U.S., passed through Baku, a city of 2 million dotted with
a hodgepodge of elegant but neglected late-19th-century European
structures, blighted Soviet blocs, and gleaming new "oil-money"
high-rises. In early February, a 50-strong delegation from the
Conference of Presidents of Major American Organi-zations was received
by Aliyev. In April, the Azeri president welcomed Israeli tycoon Lev
Leviev. Leviev, born in nearby Uzbekistan, heads his own non-profit
organization, which has a Chabad-Lubavitch religious and educational
agenda, and runs religious programs in much of the former Soviet Union,
particularly in the Muslim republics of Central Asia.
And in early June, Israeli National Infrastructures Minister Binyamin
Ben-Eliezer arrived in Baku, to explore the idea of purchasing Azeri
oil or gas at some time in the future.
The star of today’s delegation is Yosef Chagall, 56, a Baku-born former
journalist and newly elected member of Knesset from the right-wing
Yisrael Beiteinu party, who immigrated to Israel in 1977 and is making
his maiden voyage back home as an MK. Azerbaijan’s National Assembly
also boasts its first Jewish representative, Yedva Abramov (though
three of his children now live in Israel, Abramov says he did not hide
his Jewishness on visits to Syria, Pakistan and North Korea). At the
tomb Chagall, with Lenk at his side, lays the ceremony’s first wreath
on behalf of the State of Israel, which opened an embassy in Baku
in 1993. That act of diplomacy hasn’t been reciprocated, however,
in part because Azerbaijan, though secular, sees a role for itself
in the Islamic world as well as with the West.
In June, Azerbaijan assumed the annual chairmanship of the Organization
of Islamic Countries (OIC), and the organization’s yearly meeting
took place in Baku. Insiders say an Azeri embassy in Tel Aviv would
be perceived as a "tease" to Iran, which is home to 20 million ethnic
Azeris just across the borders established by Russia and the Western
powers in the first half of the 20th century. Another example of
the Azeri balancing act: At the World Conference Against Racism in
Durban in 2001, which Israel and the U.S. abandoned in protest over
anti-Israel sentiment, Azerbaijan was one of 10 nations that abstained
rather than vote for or against a compromise motion.
The motion eventually passed 51-38, to eliminate the charge of racism
against Israel. And, in fact, Iran is a constant presence in Baku,
say insiders, supporting, for example a large bookstore in downtown
Baku known as Alhoda (Almighty), where one can buy religious books
and framed posters of Iran’s leaders from the stern-looking male
sales staff.
The second wreath is presented by regional leaders of the Euro-Asian
Jewish Congress. (Each of the wreaths is the size of a semi-trailer
tire, embellished with hundreds of roses, and satin sashes bearing
gold lettering in the Azeri language.) A political NGO created by
Jewish oligarch Alexander Mashkevich 15 years ago, EAJC is now a
regional section of the World Jewish Congress, with offices in Moscow
and Kiev and links with communities across Central Asia. Mashkevich,
a former university lecturer in philology in Kyrgyzstan who made an
estimated $1 billion in mining and banks and is known to have Azeri
business interests, maintains homes in Belgium and Israel but is said
by employees to "live on an airplane." In late June, Mashkevich was
presented with an award from the Keren Hayesod fundraising organization
by Prime Minister Ehud Olmert.
Underscoring the close ties between the Russian Jewish machers and
the locals, EAJC operatives move about Baku’s corridors of power like
kings, freely initiating press conferences and government meetings,
to the occasional discomfort of Lenk, who feels they are acting on
their own rather than coordinating with the official representative
of the Jewish state.
Chagall seems to be expressing the view of both his new country and
the EAJC leaders when, speaking to a gaggle of local TV reporters
covering his return to Baku as an MK, he says admiringly, "Heydar
was like Arik Sharon. He knew how to make the switch" from ideology
to pragmatism when realities changed.
Azerbaijan is sandwiched strategically between Russia, Turkey and
Iran. With the latter it shares a 432-km border, religion and, with
20 million Iranians, a common ethnic identity, language and history.
For almost two centuries oil has determined – cynics say ruined –
its fate. Discovered in the 1880s, Baku’s oil fields dwarfed those
of the same period in Pennsylvania, Texas and Oklahoma, and by 1901
they were yielding more crude than all the wells in the United States
combined. Russian rule, which had begun earlier, by conquest, in 1828,
brought schools and a degree of modernity to Azerbaijan (Czarist-era
buildings, some mutilated by the Soviets, still grace downtown Baku),
but it also brought political repression and unsuccessful attempts
to convert the Muslims to the Russian Orthodox Church.
Still, in the last quarter of the 19th century, an educated Muslim
elite, which believed that a modernized, secular Islam could be
compatible with Western science and democracy, sprung up. Fueled
by Muslim oil barons such as Shamsi Assadullayev (whose glorious
Parisian-styled mansion at 9 Gogol Street in Baku was later subdivided
into communal housing by the Soviets and was recently renovated by
young Baku entrepreneurs), Azeri teachers, writers and poets forged
a modern Azeri national consciousness, and ushered in a golden era
of arts, literature and culture, which included the first operas
written by Muslims. Late-19th-century Baku was a cosmopolitan city that
included 11 mosques, four Russian Orthodox cathedrals, a synagogue, 12
printing presses, a boy’s and girl’s classical gymnasia high school,
and a special Russian-language school for Muslim adults, according
to a 1997 book on Old Baku by Nazim Ibrahimov.
The secular Muslims of that era ruled the independent Azerbaijan
Democratic Republic, which was established in 1918-1920, in the
wake of the collapse of the czarist empire and continues to inspire
opposition leader Mollazade. "The idea that a Muslim can be secular,
tolerant and democratic was established right here in Baku long ago,"
he says. But it ended with the oil-thirsty Bolshevik conquest of
Azerbaijan in April 1920. Baku crude was nationalized and dispensed
free to Russia, neighboring Armenia and Georgia. A Soviet-era bronze
statue depicting a woman throwing off her veil still stands in a
downtown Baku square, ironically in front of a building occupied by
the National Melli Bank of Iran. The Soviets eventually drove out the
Azeri intellectual elite and repressed religion, a move that has made
it more difficult for 21st-century Islamic fundamentalism to put down
roots since independence. Indeed 70 years of rule by the Soviet empire
left its mark on Baku, where after generations, some of the social
distinctions between Central Asian Azeris and transplanted European
Russians have become blurred. There are few mosques; pork and alcohol
can be found in many restaurants; there’s nary a headscarf in sight;
and a constitutional law separating religion and state is firmly
enforced. "I don’t have any religious friends," says Fuad Akhundov,
a 38-year-old Baku police investigator and popular local historian
who moonlights as a tour guide.
Azerbaijan had its second chance at independence after the Soviet
empire crumbled. The republic’s first democratically elected president,
Abulfez Elchibey, saw himself as spiritual heir to the independent
Azeris of 1918. But Elchibey was also an Azeri dreamer who studied
the Israeli ulpan method with an eye toward phasing out Russian as
Azerbaijan’s official tongue and replacing it with Azeri.
After two years Elchibey, who allowed Azerbaijan to slide into
financial ruin and war with Armenia, was overthrown and Heydar
Aliyev, speaker of the parliament at the time, assumed power and later
consolidated his control in seemingly democratic elections. His rule
brought stability. "Elchibey was too ideological, when he should have
been practical," says Dr. Brenda Shaffer, director of research of
the Caspian Studies Project at Harvard University who lives in Israel.
Other experts have said the country needed a father figure, an
assertion Molladaze finds belittling. "We were writing operas in
1918. We didn’t need Heydar Aliyev."
But Aliyev proved to be useful for the West. In 1994, he signed what
Azeris refer to as the Contract of the Century, which initiated
the construction of the country’s mammoth $4-billion, 1,093-mile
Baku-Tbilsi-Ceyhan (BTC) pipeline, built with American political
muscle and cash from a consortium of international firms. In July,
the recently completed pipeline will start carrying a million barrels
per day of Caspian Sea crude to Turkey’s Mediter- ranean coast from
Azerbaijan via Georgia, cutting down Europe’s dependence on Russian
and Middle Eastern energy. And it’s a project that Israel is quietly
hoping to benefit from some day, either as an end user of crude or
by serving as a transit point for oil heading on to Asian markets via
the existing 158-mile Eilat-Ashkelon pipeline (EAP), which was built
in 1968 to carry oil in the other direction, from Iran to the West.
Over lunch at the Philharmonic, a sun-splashed Italian restaurant
near Baku’s government complex, Ambassador Lenk, who was born in
New Jersey, highlights points of cooperation. The weekly Azerbaijani
Airlines flights between Tel Aviv and Baku are packed, and there are
Jewish studies programs, with local and Israeli students and some
Israeli faculty, at Baku State University. He points out that Israeli
agro-businesses recently visited Baku for a bilateral trade forum, and
that Israeli technology in telecommunications and waste management is
being used in Azerbaijan. (In the past, Israelis have had financial
interests in, among other things, Azerbaijan’s second-largest cell
phone firm, a hospital project and a turkey farm.)
Azerbaijani religious tolerance has also allowed the local Jewish
communities, which may number as many as 16,000 people (see "Depleted
Ranks," page 27), to function openly, he says. For example, there
are two Jewish schools in Baku, two synagogues and a recently opened
Jewish community center. For its 58th Independence Day celebrations,
the Israel Embassy hosted 1,000 people at a concert in a large central
Baku theater, flying in Jewish Azerbaijani singers and musicians who
now live in Israel.
And then there’s Sheikh Alla Shukur Pasha Zade, the Shi’ite spiritual
leader of all the Caucasus region, also a carryover from Soviet
days, who routinely accompanies Aliyev on his presidential visits to
Islamic countries and is also happy to meet visiting Jews. A burly,
friendly man who resembles TV character Fred Flintstone and wears
a pointy Persian lamb’s wool hat, he graciously receives us in his
mint-green Baku palace, where male servants in socks serve tea, Azeri
pastries and chocolates. "I wish all the best to the Jewish community
in Azerbaijan. I am very close to them," Zade announces in Azeri to
the delegation, whose members sit on elegant green gilt chairs.
The sheikh, whose self-published biographical picture book also
depicts him in warm embrace with Yasser Arafat, says that he sent a
letter to Prime Minister Ehud Olmert wishing him good luck. Later,
he tells me that the day after 9/11, he called a press conference to
strongly condemn terror. As for Palestinian suicide bombers, he says,
"killing innocent people is not acceptable by Islamic law. There’s
nothing to debate." To underscore his commitment to religious
coexistence, he recently contributed funds toward the renovation of a
Baku synagogue. "Why not?" he asks. "They needed help and we are all
the children of Abraham," says the cleric, who leads the 60 percent
of Azeri Muslims who are Shi’ites.
Israel’s main selling point with Azerbaijan is not Israeli. Rather,
it’s the American Jewish lobby, which, encouraged by Israel, has
helped Azerbaijan in Congress. The background to the story is the
Nagorno-Karabakh conflict. The anguish with which Azeris speak of
their loss of the region and what they perceive to be international
indifference to the tragic occupation of their land by Armenia
cannot be underestimated. "Why is everyone just interested in the
Israeli-Palestinian conflict and no one, not even fellow Muslim
countries, cares about the loss of our land? And the Armenians
are Christians," says Haji Zohrab, a 42-year-old trinket seller in
old Baku. Foreign Minister Elmar Mammady-arov, a career diplomat
whose perfect English was polished during the six years spent in
Washington, says the conflict "affects every aspect of our relations
with neighboring countries."
A particularly painful sore point is Section 907, a U.S. congressional
amendment to the 1992 Soviet Freedom Support Act, aimed at boosting
economic and humanitarian aid to all of the 15 emerging former
Soviet republics except Azerbaijan. Passed at the urging of the
Armenian-American lobby in 1993, when the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict
was flaring, 907 barred the U.S. from military or other cooperation
with Azerbaijan. "Every child knows about 907, and it’s on TV at
least once a week," says Harvard’s Brenda Shaffer.
Encouraged by Israel, influential American Jewish groups have
since acted on behalf of Baku as a bulwark against the powerful
American-Armenian lobby in Congress and have tried to get 907
repealed. Since 2002, when the U.S. needed Azeri airspace to reach
Afghanistan, the U.S. has agreed to annual presidential waivers of
907, which lift restrictions. Despite the temporary respites, Shaffer
says that the U.S. is "apparently unwilling" to take any action that
would give Azerbaijan "military parity" with Armenia. American policy
toward Azerbaijan, which on the one hand courts Baku and on the other
maintains a distance from it, Shaffer says, "is uncoordinated and
doesn’t make any sense."
Mark Levin is executive director of the National Conference on
Soviet Jewry, a Washington-based advocacy organization, a member
of the coalition of Jewish groups that have worked on behalf of
Azerbaijan’s interests on Capitol Hill. Levin, who traveled to Baku
with the Conference of Presidents in February, says the organized
Jewish community has "worked closely with the administration to
implement the presidential waiver of 907 in 2002, and the coalition
"continues to express support on a regular basis for the waiver,"
which is subject to annual review.
The American-Armenian lobby in Washington "is very strong and
organized, and speaks in a unified voice," Levin explains. "On other
political issues we have partnered with [the Armenians], but when it
comes to Azerbaijan, we are on different sides of the fence." While
there may be "certain problems" with Azerbaijan’s internal politics,
Levin acknowledges, on the whole American Jewish policymakers feel
comfortable in their strong support of Azerbaijan on the Hill and take
their cue from the U.S. and Israel, which are themselves "promoting
strong relations" with Azerbaijan. Levin interprets Ilham Aliyev’s
White House visit in April as a "very strong statement of support"
from the Bush administration.
"American Jews have helped us lobby in Washington against the Armenians
and their help is very important. We are very appreciative," confirms
Foreign Minister Mammadyarov. And Sheikh Alla Shukur Pasha Zade is
unequivocal, telling the gathered delegation: "I know that Jewish
groups have played a role against the Armenian lobby in trying to
find a positive alternative to the conflict. I would like to express
my gratitude to these groups for lobbying on Azerbaijan’s behalf."
An elegant man, clad in slacks, blazer and tie, opposition politician
Asim Mollazade was an Elchibey supporter and Azerbaijan’s ambassador
to Iran in the early 1990s; he’s also visited Israel, and has lectured
at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore. I met him at a dinner party
in honor of Chagall at Lenk’s home, attended by Baku’s diplomatic
corps and local Azeri pols. Later, he shared his grim outlook over
cappuccinos at the nearby luxury Baku Hyatt hotel complex, home to
diplomats and foreign businesspeople anxious to cash in on the energy
boom, from which, he claims, Azerbaijan only receives 10 percent of
oil royalties. (Amit Mor, an independent Israeli energy consultant,
calls Mollazade’s estimate too low. He says that with taxes and other
fees, Azerbaijan likely collects closer to 50 percent of royalties.)
Mollazade, a political scientist, blames the U.S. and others who
supported Ilham Aliyev, including the American Jewish lobby, which
he laments "played a negative role." In 2003, he argues, Azerbaijan
should have been pressured to have open, democratic elections.
Instead, according to a Human Rights Watch report, the Azeri government
"heavily intervened in the campaign process in Ilham’s favor," stacking
the Central Election Committee with local supporters, banning NGOs from
monitoring the vote, and preventing public participation in oppositions
rallies. "With all our oil, secular Muslim outlook and high level of
education, we could have been a model nation," he insists. "Instead
we created a few rich oligarchs, and got a big dose of repression
and those ridiculous posters of Heydar Aliyev everywhere. It makes
me sick to look at them."
Mollazade recalls a violent October 16, 2003, crackdown on opposition
groups by pro-government forces two weeks before Ilham Aliyev’s
election. And he says that academics supporting the opposition
(which he says boils down to just five or six people in the 125-seat
National Assembly) are still blacklisted from university positions;
he includes himself in this category. "I am barred from teaching in
the university here," he says.
In drawing parallels with Iran, Mollazade says that in the second
half of the 1970s, Iran had $22 billion in annual oil revenue but
it only benefited the Shah and his government. "The same thing is
happening here." Azerbaijan, he says, is taking $1 billion in annual
oil revenues, a figure expected to reach $5 billion by 2010, "but
nothing has trickled down." The average take-home wage in Azerbaijan,
he points out, is a meager $50 per month; 42 percent of the country
lives below the poverty line; health insurance is practically
nonexistent; and roughly 3 million Azeris have emigrated, mostly to
Russia. And while Azerbaijani law bars religious parties from running
for office (including the Islamic Party of Azerbaijan, formed in1992),
Mollazade says the writing is on the wall. He predicts that "trouble
will come from Islamic extremists. Go to the mosques on Friday. They
are getting fuller each week."
Azerbaijan has also felt the presence of world jihad. In April,
according to the Anti-Defamation League, an Azeri court convicted
16 Al-Qaeda militants of premeditated murder and other charges in
the killing of an Azeri policeman. The terror cell, which reportedly
trained in nearby Georgia, was apparently headed for operations against
the Russian forces in Chechnya, another of Azerbaijan’s neighbors.
Mollazade believes that "the magic moment for democratic change
passed and we lost time," and that in a few years, he himself will
be against democratic elections in Azerbaijan because that will bring
on the ayatollahs. Look what happened in Palestine and in Iraq."
But Shaffer, who knows and likes Molla-zade, think his pessimism
is overstated. Speaking broadly, she says oil-producing societies,
such as Azerbaijan, often have problems of corruption. "It happens
in democratic societies too. There’s just too much money floating
around." Aliyev, she points out, is taking steps in the right direction
and she is particularly encouraged by his "professional" appointments.
Ticking off a list, she says, "The head of the state oil fund
is a Harvard grad, full of motivation and a gem. The minister of
communication studied all aspects of the issues, even coming to Israel
to study privatization here. The foreign minister is a savvy diplomat
who knows Washington." Shaffer says corruption is hard to measure in
countries like Azerbaijan, where there is a strong cultural imperative
to assist one’s relatives, a concept Westerners view as corruption,
but Azeris consider a moral duty. Also, she points out that high
corruption ratings in international indices are sometimes indicative
of an open society where people don’t fear telling the truth. "In
Syria there’s no corruption," she says ironically.
Shaffer agrees that much of Azerbaijan, especially in the periphery,
is poor and that more rural people are leaving their homes to try
their luck in the cities. But one indicator signaling that life
has improved somewhat is reflected in the lifestyle of a socially
"unconnected" Azeri family with whom she has lived intermittently for
over a decade. "They didn’t have running water in 1997; now they own a
large apartment with a computer, and their son studies at univer-sity,"
she says.
The 42-year-old San Francisco-born Shaffer, who immigrated to Israel at
age 18 and developed a passion for Azerbaijan because of its tolerant
Muslim ethos, also disputes Molla-daze’s assertion that Israeli
and American Jewish support was misguided. "Azer- baijani religious
tolerance," she says, "is real, and considering what’s going on in the
world today, is extraordinary. Not only is it Muslim Shi’ite, it’s
one of the few places in the world where a Jew or Israeli can visit
and feel completely normal and accepted." Indeed trinket-seller Haji
Zohrab, a religious Muslim who recently returned from the pilgrimage to
Mecca, is hard-pressed to say anything anti-Israel. "I watch CNN and
see the bloodshed" between the Israelis and Palestinians, he told me
in the course of a lengthy conversation in in his cluttered, rug-filled
Baku shop. "I am pained to see the loss of life on both sides."
Foreign Minister Mammadyarov, for his part, doesn’t deny that
Azerbaijan is plagued by corruption or the perception that it lacks
democracy. "We have problems and we are trying to confront them. We
are a young country." Lenk too prefers to dwell on the pragmatics
of Azerbaijan’s political reality. "They are a small state in a very
difficult neighborhood," he says, adding, "not unlike Israel."
Historian Fuad Akhudov, like Molladaze, takes pride in the Azerbaijani
renaissance of the early 1920s. He and I spend an afternoon wandering
around downtown Baku, where many sidewalks are crumbling and traffic
lights are practically nonexistent, making it dangerous to cross
a street. His passion for Baku is evident in the heavy folder
of historical postcards he carries. The propensity for accepting
authoritarian regimes, from the Russians of the 19th century to the
Soviets and others of the 20th, he says, is a tragedy rooted in the
national character, which he calls, "peaceful and accepting."
Akhudov and I sit in a park studying the elegant structures erected
in the late 19th century by oil baron and philanthropist Zeinalabdin
Tagiev, which are now part of a local Baku college. We also explore
the baronial home of Shamsi Assadullayev, on Gogol Street (in fact,
most Russian street names have been replaced), and are shown around
by a Russian woman who lived there in Soviet times, in a communal
apartment carved out of a grand dining room. "A Jewish family once
lived there," she says, pointing to a room near the kitchen, "but
they left for Israel." The woman has since managed to consolidate the
apartment, which she rents for "many hundreds of dollars" per month,
attesting to the growing demand in Baku for attractive housing.
At the trendy Picasso cafe, Akhudov, who respectfully put on a skullcap
when visiting the local synagogues with me, says he feels "indebted"
to Azerbaijan’s Jews. "They were the intellectual elite in Baku,
the best doctors, musicians. But most have gone. It’s sad."
Shaffer notes what she calls "positive anti-Semitism," in which Jews
are idealized, is widespread in Azerbaijan. "Jews are assumed to be
the smartest in the class." With most of Azerbaijan’s Jews now gone,"
she says, a whole generation of Azeris will grow up without knowing
them or valuing them. It concerns me."
Akhudov says he’s now planning to emulate the Jews and emigrate too.
He’s thinking of Canada. He doesn’t speak directly against the
government but says he feels as if he has no future in Azerbaijan.
Their pace of improvements, he says diplomatically, is too slow. "And
we Azeris are too patient."
Depleted Ranks
By Netty C. Gross
Three hundred students, 80 percent of them Sephardi, are enrolled at
the Orthodox co-ed Or Avner Chabad Educational School, which opened
in 2002 in a walled-off complex in Baku, where most of Azerbaijan’s
estimated 16,000 Jews live. The school – whose $1-million budget is
covered in full by Israeli tycoon Lev Leviev – is popular, in part
because of its full-day mixed secular and Jewish curriculum, and its
freshly cooked lunches, but also because it charges no tuition.
Admission requirements are liberal, though applicants are asked if
their mothers are Jewish. Forty percent of the pupils are of mixed
Jewish-Muslim parentage, creating some unique problems, reports
school rabbi Meir Bruk, who is also Azer- baijan’s chief Ashkenazi
rabbi. Two years ago, about a dozen students "fasted on Yom Kippur
for their mothers, and during Ramadan for their fathers," and last
year two maintained both fasts. "Kids who study here have a more
pronounced Jewish identity," he says.
In fact, the mixed-marriage pupils get a break when it comes to
prayer, which is forbidden at all schools by Azerbaijan’s laws
separating religion and state. Surprisingly Bruk, who says his
pupils are generally not from observant homes, isn’t bothered by the
restriction. "Those rules are directed at Islamic fundamentalists
who are trying to stir up trouble here, not us. We are very patriotic
Azeris."
At the same time a pronounced nationalist and Zionist ethos,
underscoring the close ties between Azerbaijan and Israel, wafts
through the cheerful corridors of the immaculate main building. Walls
are covered with student artwork relating to Israel; flags of
Azerbaijan and pictures of its president are proudly displayed.
There’s also a prominent memorial dedicated to Albert Agranov, a young
Azerbaijani Jewish conscript who died in 1992 in the Nagorno-Karabakh
conflict.
With support from overseas provided in some cases by Azeri Jewish
emigrants or American Jews, several new Jewish projects have opened
in recent years. The American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee,
for example, has raised millions of dollars for a new JCC-style Jewish
Community House in Baku, which also received Holocaust restitution
grants from the New York-based Claims Conference.
According to its director, Meir Zizov, 110 elderly Holocaust survivors
or refugees from the Nazi regime and from other parts of the former
Soviet Union receive assistance. In 2003, Leviev and others renovated
Baku’s Ashkenazi synagogue, which is mainly used by foreigners and
visitors.
Against all this vibrancy stands the old Mountain Jew synagogue in
Baku, which once served the city’s dominant community of Jews from
the Caucasus. Unlike its Ashkenazi counterpart, the synagogue is old
and traditional; the beadle, or shamash, politely asks me to don
a headscarf before entering the main sanctuary, with its ornately
decorated Torah ark. Though neat and well-cared for, there is a
sadness here. Each seat in the U-shaped pews is marked by a miniature
hand-woven carpet, but the shamash laments that "our community is
almost gone." Of his 10 siblings, he’s the only one left in Baku;
all the others have moved to Israel.
His lament takes on special poignancy when I visit the Jewish Agency
headquarters in Baku, a large, airy building with sky-blue walls.
Wandering around the cheerful structure, which is staffed by young,
hip-looking Azeri Jews in jeans who listen to loud American rock music
while they work, I find a packed classroom of adults who are studying
Hebrew with an eye toward aliya. One man says that he knows the dangers
of life in Israel, "because your Muslims are not peaceful like ours,"
but he wants a "better life for my children. There is no future here."
Emigration to Israel, Russia and Germany has decimated the Jewish
community of Azerbaijan – there are today an estimated 10,000 to
16,000 Jews, down from some 80,000 until the early 1990s. Indeed,
the dilemma facing those remaining is whether to stay behind and
help bolster Jewish identity or to emigrate. One of the ironies of
the Jewish exodus is that Jews "have more options than ever here,"
says Prof. Michael Chlenov, Moscow-based secretary general of the
Euro-Asian Jewish Congress.
There are about twice as many Mountain Jews as Ashkenazim, and Baku
also has about 500 Jews from nearby Georgia. Local legend has it that
the Mountain Jews, who speak their own dialect called Judeo-Tat, are
descended from the 10 lost tribes who were exiled from Israel in 722
BCE and settled in the Caucasus Mountains. Some local Mountain Jews
tell a different story: that their forefathers emigrated from what
is now Iran in the mid-18th century and established Krasnaya Sloboda,
around the city of Quba in the highlands of northern Azerbaijan.
According to some accounts, all-Jewish Krasnaya Sloboda once had a
population of as much as 18,000; after World War II and emigration,
only 4,000 remain. Occasional anti-Semitic acts, including a pogrom
in the 1920s, have marred generally peaceful relations.
European Ashkenazim arrived in Baku in the early 19th century, after
the annexation of Azerbaijan to Russia. Members of the professional
elite, most of the Ashkenazim live in Baku. Mountain Jewish businessmen
who prospered in the capital have moved on to Moscow, Chlenov says.
Jews started drifting out of Azerbaijan in the mid-1970s but emigration
reached its peak in the early 1990s. The Azeri government says it
still keeps an eye out for its native sons and daughters.
Over an elegant fish dinner at the chic Aqua Marine restaurant in Baku,
Nazim Ibrahimov, the dapper Muslim chair of the state’s committee
on Azerbaijanis living in foreign countries, says his office gets
regular updates on Jews in Israel. "I know they have some problems
and we have it on our agenda," he says vaguely, referring to the
immigrant experience of Mountain Jews in Israel, which has been
plagued by unemployment, crime and other social ills.
I ask how safe Jews are in Azerbaijan, pointing out that all the
Jewish institutions in Baku appear to be protected by armed guards.
Ibrahimov says the security is "just a precaution." Matvey Elizarov,
vice president of the World Congress of Mountain Jews, adds that Jews
walk freely around Baku with kippot on their heads. "The tolerance
is real," he says. And even if it isn’t, says another well-connected
dinner participant, "it’s good for the Azeris to think it is."