AZERBAIJAN DESERVES U.S. PUBLIC ATTENTION
By Jennifer Mishory – Daily Bruin Reporter
[email protected]
Derek Liu/Daily Bruin
The UCLA Daily Bruin, CA
Oct 23 2006
UC Irvine doctorate student Javid Huseynov spoke Saturday at a
conference for Azerbaijani youth.
When I decided that the first Azerbaijani-American Youth Conference
would be an interesting column topic, it was with the assumption that
most readers, like me, would struggle to spell its name and locate
it on a map.
Azerbaijan, a secular Muslim country located between Iran and
Russia, is a former Soviet satellite with a history of conflict with
neighboring Armenia. The population is ethnically Azeri; there are
also about 20-30 million Azeris living in Iran, while the population
of Azerbaijan itself is only 8 million.
Seemingly unknown to the multitude of students streaming in to the
dining halls below, the conference drew about 50 attendees, most of
them Azeri, and took place in Covel Commons on Saturday.
The conference was put on by the Azerbaijani American Council of
California.
Javid Huseynov, a doctorate student at UC Irvine, said the purpose
of the event was to strengthen ties between Azeri communities from
a variety of countries now residing in the United States. There are
400,000 Azeris in the United States, with over 100,000 of those living
in California, he said.
With Russia trying to strengthen its hold on the region and
American-Iranian relations becoming more tense everyday, our relations
with their neighbor, Azerbaijan, will be important. It is a chance
to secure friendship and promote democratic values in a country that
has both ties to a large population of Iran and huge oil reserves.
The Azeri population in Iran has nationalistic tendencies, and recently
they have staged protests due to the economic situation in the region,
said journalist Abolfazl Bahadori.
Bahadori is a graphic designer who works part-time for Radio Liberty,
a U.S.-sponsored radio station based in Prague that broadcasts to
Azerbaijan. He reports specifically about the Azeri population in Iran.
There are no U.S.-backed radio stations broadcasting to Iran in
anything but Persian, perhaps missing an entire population that we
could be communicating with, he said.
With Azerbaijan’s key location and economic growth, I wondered why
there was not more interest in the conference outside of the Azeri
community. The only non-Azeris that I met were two Turkish USC students
hoping to demonstrate Turkish solidarity with Azerbaijan.
With few oil-rich democracies and fewer Muslim democracies, the U.S.
should show greater interest, and look to promote Azerbaijan’s
transition from Soviet satellite to a democratic nation.
International monitors of the 2005 election of President Ilham Aliyev
found the elections to be tainted by fraud.
Huseynov said because Azerbaijan only gained its independence fifteen
years ago, they are becoming democratic "in an evolutionary way."
Because of their membership in the Council of Europe and other ties
with the west, "it is inevitable that they fall under European norms"
and become increasingly democratic, he said.
The U.S. already has strong economic ties with Azerbaijan. Their
newest oil pipeline spans 1100 miles and is a U.S.-backed project,
said Deputy Counsel General Elman Abdullayev.
For the U.S., Azerbaijan represents an opportunity to encourage
democracy in a primarily Muslim and oil-rich nation, a chance that
the U.S. must not let slip away.
For the average UCLA student, the Azerbaijani conference represents
the multitude of opportunities that exist right under our noses,
or in this case, right above our dining halls.