Azerbaijan’s election

Date: 05/11/05

The two faces of Azerbaijan and its president

IN THE inscrutable Caucasus, things are rarely what they seem. So it has been with the dual election campaign before the parliamentary vote in Azerbaijan on November 6th.

One campaign has involved decrees on electoral propriety from Ilham Aliev, Azerbaijan's president, the open registration of candidates, plans for exit-polling and the release of political prisoners. Beneath these niceties, however, lies another campaign that has alarmed foreign election and human-rights observers. This one features the beating and detention of opposition candidates and their supporters, media bias, and bizarre allegations of a coup plot that followed a mysteriously aborted homecoming by an exiled opposition leader. This election may yet be judged to have been little cleaner than the rigged presidential poll in 2003, when Mr Aliev succeeded his father Heidar, a Soviet-era boss who ran the country again for the last decade of his life.

Azerbaijan matters--much more than its neighbour, Georgia, which thanks to its telegenic, English-speaking president, Mikhail Saakashvili, has generally had a higher profile. Azerbaijan has more people (8m), and most are Muslims. It is in a rough neighbourhood: to the north is Dagestan, an anarchic region of Russia; to the south, Iran. It lost a chunk of its territory in a war with Armenia in the 1990s, and the two countries may yet fight another. Above all, it has oil and gas: new pipelines will soon carry both from the Caspian to the Mediterranean. And, like its election, Azerbaijan has two faces. It is a proud, booming nation with a westernised elite and a glamorous capital, Baku; it is also grotesquely corrupt, beset by clan rivalries, its bureaucrats fattening on backhanders while 40% of the country lives in poverty.

The oil, competition with Russia for influence in the former Soviet Union, plus Azerbaijan's strategic location, might suggest that America and the European Union should be content with Mr Aliev and the stability he seems to offer. But that would be the wrong policy: for the West, for its reputation in the wider Muslim world, and for Azerbaijan itself. The country's choice may be between allowing more democracy now and facing nastier change in a decade or so, after many of the petrodollars have been squandered. It is too late for this weekend's flawed election to be made perfect. But America and the EU could still try to ensure an orderly count, and--rather as they did in Ukraine last year--pressure the authorities to refrain from violence in the event of demonstrations.

The real test is for Mr Aliev, who is as much of a Caucasian enigma as his country. To westerners, the president talks of tackling corruption, spreading wealth and joining Europe. This Mr Aliev seems to understand that, since power in Azerbaijan mostly resides with the presidency (and his parliamentary party is popular), he has more to lose than to gain from another rigged vote, and is striving to rein in unreconstructed election officials and over-zealous police. But the other Mr Aliev is secretly in cahoots with them. This other Mr Aliev denies the existence of flagrant human-rights abuses and cannot overcome a reflexive post-Soviet suspicion of opposition, or the belief that only overwhelming election victories count. Next week, it will not be enough for him to plead, as sham reformers tend to, that his is a country in transition: he must put an end to political harassment, and see that polling violations are punished. This is Mr Aliev's chance to prove that he can become a truly democratic leader, not just a simulacrum.Editorial previews the election.

IFES: Electionguide.org: Azerbaijan, November 2005 http://www.electionguide.org/elecauthority/azerbaijanEA.htm

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