AS A student at the London School of Economics, Murad Gassanly spent his spare time hanging around with the sons and daughters of Azerbaijan’s post-Soviet elite. They cruised in sports cars, dined out at The Ivy and thought nothing of spending £2,000 on a night at a Mayfair club.
Mr Gassanly, an Azeri who moved to Britain with his family in 1993, assumed that they were living off the legitimate profits of Azerbaijan’s resurgent oil industry. But when he returned briefly to Azerbaijan in 2002, he found a country mired in poverty and corruption and dominated by a handful of super-rich government officials — many of whom were the parents of his friends.
Mr Gassanly, a 26-year-old British citizen and Labour Party activist, is now in the front line of a campaign to stage a peaceful revolution in Azerbaijan like those that rocked Georgia in 2003 and Ukraine last year. “Azerbaijan is run by a corrupt, authoritarian regime,” he told The Times. “I’m here to try to make sure that people here have the same freedoms I enjoyed in Britain.”
As a political consultant to the opposition Azadliq (Freedom) bloc, he is co-ordinating its efforts to win Western support for the opposition if the Government rigs parliamentary elections on Sunday.
It is, however, a far more formidable task than in Georgia or Ukraine. The Government of Azerbaijan is determined to prevent any repetition of those revolutions and the West’s priority is to maintain stability in a country where it has key strategic interests.
Azerbaijan is rated as one of the poorest and most corrupt countries in the region, with more than 40 per cent of its people living below the poverty line. It has been ruled most of the time since its independence from Russia by Heydar Aliyev, a hardline former KGB chief who was succeeded by his son, Ilham, in 2003.
But this secular Islamic state on the Caspian Sea is also a key element of the United States’s strategy to contain Iran and secure access to the Caspian’s huge oil and gas reserves.
A staunch US ally, Azerbaijan was one of the few Muslim states that sent troops to Iraq. The US has built radar stations near its border with Iran. Western companies have also invested billons of dollars in a building a pipeline to take Caspian oil from Baku, via Georgia and Turkey, to the Mediterranean. President Aliyev says that there is no cause for a revolution because his country is on the crest of an oil boom that will eradicate poverty and unemployment. Ali Hasanov, a senior presidential aide, told The Times: “Even if the US wanted a revolution here, it would be impossible, because the people do not want it.”
The opposition accuses President Aliyev of trying to pack Parliament with his friends and relatives and has threatened to bring tens of thousands of people on to the streets after the elections.
“If there are massive falsifications, we will call on the people to fight, within the bounds of the constitution,” said Ali Kerimli, one of Azadliq’s leaders.
But the opposition has failed to come up with a coherent platform or to unite behind a single leader, as Ukrainians did behind Viktor Yushchenko. Some opposition leaders fear that Western governments may tone down their criticism of electoral abuses for the sake of their strategic interests. “Our wealth is our poverty,” Sardar Jalaloglu, another senior Azadliq figure, said. “Our revolution will not be as easy as in Georgia or Ukraine.”
Over the past few months the Government has repeatedly used riot police to break up opposition rallies in the centre of Baku, injuring dozens of people. It has also broken up youth groups that tried to emulate movements in Serbia, Georgia and Ukraine. When Rasul Guliyev, an exiled opposition leader, tried to return to Azerbaijan this month after nine years of self-imposed exile in the US, the Government refused to let his plane land and detained hundreds of opposition supporters.
Two days later Mr Aliyev sacked a dozen senior officials and had two of them, the economy and health ministers, arrested for allegedly planning to stage a coup with Mr Guliyev. The European Union and the Organisation for Security and Co-operation in Europe expressed concern. But President Bush sent a letter to Mr Aliyev, welcoming his “commitment to a free and fair election”. He added: “I look forward to working with you after these elections.”
Under Western pressure, Mr Aliyev issued a decree this month allowing the use of indelible ink to mark voters’ fingers and permitting foreign-funded NGOs to monitor the vote. But critics dismiss that as too little, too late, and opposition supporters are preparing for violent clashes with riot police after the results. Mr Gassanly is likely to be in the thick of them. Earlier this month he was detained for six hours after police broke up a rally. The British Embassy had to intervene to get him released.
It is a far cry from his political activity at home, where he worked on Frank Dobson’s attempt to become mayor of London and campaigned for a hospital bus to be reinstated in the constituency of Westminster. But he said that he was driven by fear that Azerbaijan’s people may lose faith in the ideals of democracy and free markets and embrace Islamic extremism. “The West is making a mistake thinking that short-term stability is more important than long-term democracy,” he said. “Next time the flags won’t be orange. They’ll be green.”
BUILT ON OIL
Azerbaijan has roughly eight million people who speak a language closely related to Turkish and are mostly Shia Muslims
In 1900, the oil wells built by the Nobel brothers in Baku supplied half the world's oil
Azerbaijan's was the world's first Islamic state when it declared independence in 1918, but was taken over by the Soviet Union two years later
The $3.6 billion (£2 billion) BTC oil pipeline, opened this year, will bring in $50 billion for the Government over 20 years
There are 15 million ethnic Azeris living in Iran
