The view from Azerbaijan
By Tony Barber
Feb 12 12:09

Should you find yourself in Baku, skip the Versace store and Emporio
Armani. Go instead to the grand edifice with the Grecian columns that
stands between them, overlooking the Caspian Sea with its fabulous oil
and gas riches.

This building was constructed in 1960, when Azerbaijan was part of the
Soviet Union, to mark Vladimir Lenin’s 90th birthday. It is a vastly
different place these days, hosting the Museum of Azerbaijani
Independence. If you’re in luck, as I was this morning, you will be
the only visitor.

The museum’s narrative framework is summed up in a pamphlet handed to
you in exchange for the 5 manat entrance fee (about $6.30).
`Azerbaijan has been occupied by other countries for many centuries,’
it says. `Azerbaijan attracted these countries with its natural
resources and profitable geographical position. Azerbaijan has many
heroes.’

The visitor is left in no doubt that National Enemy No. 1 is Armenia,
which is depicted as committing atrocities against Azerbaijanis in
1918, as well as in the war of the early 1990s that left Armenia in
control of part of western Azerbaijan, including the territory of
Nagorno-Karabakh.

But the museum also has a disapproving message for Iran: `Thirty
million of our compatriots live on the territory of south Azerbaijan
in Iran up to the present day.’

The 70-year era of Soviet rule is briskly dealt with as an experience
that suppressed the 1918-1920 Azerbaijani Democratic Republic–`the
first democratic, parliamentary and secular republic in the Muslim
world’–and inflicted great suffering in the 1930s in the form of
Josef Stalin’s purges.

However, all this is a prelude to the exhibits in the museum’s sixth
and final hall, which celebrate the life of Heydar Aliyev, a man whose
career is indelibly painted on the past seven decades of Azerbaijani
history, not least because his son, Ilham Aliyev, succeeded him as
president in 2003.

Aliyev père joined the Soviet KGB secret police as a young man in the
1940s, rising up its ranks until he took over as head of the agency’s
Azerbaijani branch in 1967. Two years later he became Azerbaijan’s
communist party chief, lasting 18 years and joining the Politburo in
Moscow until Mikhail Gorbachev sacked him for resisting perestroika.
The museum says nothing about these phases of his career.

Instead it hails his return to public life on June 15, 1993–two years
after Azerbaijan won independence from the Soviet Union, but was
reeling in chaos–as a day that `entered our history as the Day of
National Salvation’.

Aliyev was no democrat, to put it mildly, but it is easy to see why he
is officially revered as the father of the nation. He ended the
disastrous war with Armenia. He is identified with the early era of
Azerbaijan’s newly discovered energy wealth. He put national
independence on a more secure basis.

As it says on a commemorative coin minted in 2004 to honour his
memory: `The independence of Azerbaijan is permanent, eternal,
irreversible.’

The museum’s Aliyev hall is adorned with photographs showing him with
statesmen such as Bill Clinton and Jacques Chirac, the former US and
French presidents. Quotations from his speeches are on wall panels.

But the hall’s pièce de résistance is on the floor–a diorama of the
Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan pipeline that pumps Azerbaijani oil to Europe,
bringing billions of dollars to the nation and explaining why Baku’s
seafront bursts with flashy stores selling luxury foreign cars,
jewellery and clothes.

`The most outstanding event in the economic life and overall history
of independent Azerbaijan was the signing of the first international
oil contract [in 1994],’ says the pamphlet.

Oil wealth, and the festering Nagorno-Karabakh sore, are as much part
of modern Azerbaijani reality as the closed political atmosphere and
the personality cult that surrounds the late Aliyev.

However, even in a nation whose leaders are as cautious about change
as in Azerbaijan, things will not stay the same forever.