NEWS AND VIEWS: Azerbaijan through Western eyes (01/08/06)

NEWS AND VIEWS

Azerbaijan through Western eyes

by Larissa Momryk

The parliamentary elections in Azerbaijan on November 6, 2005, and subsequent demonstrations by opposition supporters have inspired in some observers the hope that this country will follow Georgia, Ukraine and Kyrgyzstan and become the next former Soviet republic to undergo a democratic revolution.

Azerbaijan is a country of approximately 8.5 million, located on the western shore of the Caspian Sea and strategically placed between Russia and Iran. It obtained independence from the Soviet Union in 1991. Since then its history has been marked by three events.

In 1992 a war broke out between Azerbaijan and neighboring Armenia over control of the predominantly Armenian Azeri region of Nagorno-Karabakh. Although a ceasefire was signed in 1994, about one-seventh of Azerbaijan's territory remains occupied, and some 800,000 refugees and internally displaced persons are scattered throughout the country.

The ceasefire was masterminded by Azeri President Heydar Aliyev, who dramatically came to power in 1993 when his predecessor fled the capital city of Baku. Mr. Aliyev died in 2003, just two months after his son Ilham won the presidential election, which was roundly criticized by observers for not meeting international standards. But even two years after his death, Mr. Aliyev's presence is still deeply felt throughout the country, in the form of pictures and quotes plastered on billboards along every highway and in every town and village.

Heydar Aliyev was also responsible for signing, in 1994, an oil contract worth $7.4 billion with a Western consortium led by British Petroleum (BP). BP and its partners have been building a pipeline to carry oil from Baku through Tbilisi, Georgia, to the Turkish port of Ceyhan. The first oil began to pump along the "BTC pipeline" in May 2005.

This is the country where I lived from September 2004 to March 2005. Sent to Baku as part of the Department of Foreign Affairs and Canadian International Development Agency's Young Professionals International program, I was to be an intern at the Open Society Institute (Soros Foundation) but ended up splitting my time between International Foundation for Election Systems (IFES) and International Medical Corps (IMC).

When I began my internship at IFES we were just weeks away from a round of municipal elections and I was promptly sent out to visit some of the organization's voter education projects. The projects were targeted at vulnerable populations - internally displaced persons (IDPs) and refugees, youth, women, the elderly and disabled.

In Sumgayit, a city just 45 minutes outside of Baku, I sat in a chilly and bare room in an IDP settlement. A group of about 20 IDP youth listened intently as their trainers, young volunteers from the community itself, explained the voting procedure and voting rules for the municipal elections. The youths were enthusiastic participants in the voter education project - most were seen voting in the municipal elections and two of the project participants even volunteered to be election observers.

This contrasts sharply against another voter education project I observed, which aimed to reach women voters by holding training sessions in Baku-area schools (where the vast majority of teachers are women). These training sessions had much lower turnouts than the ones targeted at youth, and were often cut short by impatient school directors. The women themselves seemed deeply cynical about the elections, first about the relevance of the municipal authorities, and second about the chances of an authentic outcome to the election.

Azerbaijan is divided into over 2,000 municipalities. That's more municipalities than Brazil. It's even more than India. The municipalities have been categorized by the national authorities as non-governmental bodies, and their powers are severely limited - they can only make recommendations to the regional administrations, which are staffed by ruling party members and directly responsible to the presidential office.

My internship at IFES also gave me the opportunity to act as an observer on the day of the municipal elections in December. My partner in this endeavor was Steve, an American who was an observer in the Ukrainian presidential elections and, between rounds of voting in that election, had come to Baku to visit a friend. He ended up volunteering to observe the election there as well.

Our first stop was a school in the south end of Baku. It remains the nicest school I ever saw in Azerbaijan, with fresh plaster on the walls and new floors. It was also the nicest polling station I would see - the floors covered in carpets and the interior decorated with large, dramatic flower arrangements.

The mystery behind this was soon explained, when our interpreter piped up, "this is the school that our president attended and it is where he always comes to vote." We managed to squeeze out of the chairwoman of the voting precinct that he was expected before noon. One shared glance was all it took for Steve and me to decide to stick around to try and see the president of Azerbaijan in person.

We were not to be disappointed. He came, accompanied by his wife and one of their daughters. Their arrival was heralded by a fleet of unmarked black SUVs bearing the security service, and a mob of television and radio reporters with their cameras and tape recorders. The media clustered around the ballot box to capture the moment when the president dropped his ballot inside. Then an even larger scrum surrounded him outside the school, and he stood answering their questions for well over 20 minutes. There is no free media in Azerbaijan, so the president casting his ballot, and his comments afterwards, were the top story on every channel that evening.

Our first polling station experience was very different from the rest of our day observing the election. We visited many other schools, in towns along the Caspian shore south of Baku. All had that dirty look that is inevitable when a building is old and run down. In these polling stations, lacking carpets and flowers, and in one case heated only by the burning pilot of a gas stove, the voters cast their ballots under the watchful eye of Heydar Aliyev, whose portrait was always prominently displayed.

Surprisingly, at only one of the polling stations I visited were there any obvious signs of electoral fraud. I was made to sit in a chair from where I had no clear view of voters' names being checked off the manifest. The entire time I was there (and I stayed there longer than I did at most polling stations) everyone who came to vote was turned away with an excuse - yet the polling station had one and a half full ballot boxes. Every time I tried to approach the table where the voting precinct employees were sitting with the voter manifest they would stop what they were doing, trying to cover the manifest with their arms and refusing to look me in the eye. And the chairwoman of the precinct spent most of her time in a back room, a pile of pre-validated ballots on the desk in front of her, with the door closed.

However, many of my fellow election observers witnessed more serious violations. Two of my IFES colleagues observed a vote count in Sumgayit, where the original protocol "disappeared" toward the end of the process only to "re-appear" a few minutes later with new vote tallies written on it. And a friend of mine, acting as an observer in the south of the country, walked into a polling station to find the chairman with both his hands in an open ballot box. I imagine that incidents such as these also marred the voting process in the parliamentary election.

As part of my work with International Medical Corps, I visited the region of Kurdamir, in central Azerbaijan, in January 2005. BP has a Community Investment Program which funds projects in the communities affected by BP activity. Financially supported by this program, IMC was involved in several projects to improve the quality of health care infrastructure and services in the towns and villages along the BTC pipeline. In the small village of Topal Hasanli, not far from the regional center of Kurdamir, they constructed and supplied a new health clinic. Our trip that day was to attend the grand opening.

The small yellow building stood on a parcel of land between some village houses. It was surrounded on all four sides by a wrought-iron fence, to keep out the farm animals that grazed nearby. Staffed by one doctor and some nurses, the clinic had six small rooms, including a laboratory of rudimentary hot plates and glass beakers.

For the grand opening the children had been let out of the village school, and a van-load of nurses had been brought from the nearest hospital. When everyone was assembled and the ceremony was about to begin, the local authorities brought out two placards bearing photos of Heydar Aliyev and his son Ilham, and made sure the ruling party's flag was held aloft right next to the Azeri national flag.

This was to the great bemusement of Adam, IMC's country director, who couldn't help pointing out, once we were in the car on the way out of Topal Hasanli, how little the government had had to do with the funding and implementation of the health clinic construction project. This state of affairs - how little the ruling party invests in infrastructure, the economy (outside of the oil industry), and the citizens of Azerbaijan - has in part contributed to the prevalent dissatisfaction and current post-election protests.

I left Azerbaijan at the end of March. In August, there came a report that shopping centers in Baku were being raided by officers in civilian clothes who were confiscating orange-colored merchandise. I was bemused, for two reasons. First that the Azeri opposition, who chose orange as a reference to the success of the Orange Revolution that brought President Viktor Yushchenko to power in Ukraine, could not come up with an original color or symbol for its campaign, and second that the government seemed to believe that by suppressing the use of the color orange it could suppress the discontent felt by the opposition and its supporters.

Two opposition protests in the week following the November 6, 2005, parliamentary election drew crowds of at least 20,000. A third protest on November 19, 2005, was attended by approximately 30,000 people. Held on the outskirts of Baku, as regulated by the government, they have all ended peacefully at the end of the three permitted hours. The protesters were watched closely by police who have demonstrated in the past that they have no qualms about beating and arresting opposition supporters.

The opposition has stated that its intentions are peaceful and that it has widespread popular support. However it has also warned that it may not abide by government restrictions on demonstrations once the official election results were published. At the same time the opposition is seriously hampered by pessimism and fear among the general population.

My own experience in the country - though admittedly limited - causes me to cast a skeptical eye on current events. The cynicism of the electorate, the lack of progress in curbing voting irregularities, and the pervasiveness of the ruling party's imagery all suggest that a truly "popular" democratic revolution is still a ways off. The next presidential election in Azerbaijan is scheduled for October 2008. It will be interesting to see what three additional years of training and organization by the opposition will bring about.

But for now, President Ilham Aliyev is unlikely to relinquish control of this small but strategic country, despite the recent protests of its citizens.

Larissa Momryk graduated from McGill University in the spring of 2004 with an honors degree in political science and international development studies. She currently lives and works in Toronto.

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