IN NOVEMBER 2005, Azerbaijan held parliamentary elections. Voter participation was down 20 percent from the 2000 elections, and President Ilham Aliev’s party won overwhelmingly in what was regarded by international observers as a questionable, if not fraudulent, election. The small but increasingly visible Islamic Party of Azerbaijan was again barred from running, as in past elections. The opposition bloc lost again, as it has in every election over the past 12 years.
Dodgy elections in an impoverished, oil-rich, quasi-dictatorial former-Soviet republic isn’t exactly big news. But seen against a backdrop of the recently opened BTC oil pipeline, an almost 20 year conflict with neighboring Armenia, an antagonistic southern neighbor in Iran, an unsettled dispute to the north in Chechnya, and a rising Islamic revival, Azerbaijan is actually standing in the middle of some powerful geopolitical tectonic plates. The West would do well to pay more attention to the goings on there.
I ARRIVED IN AZERBAIJAN at the end of last November, just in time to take measure of post-election claims of fraud, opposition demonstrations, and the mounting frustration with the political system that is fueling an Islamic revival. I was surprised when the customs agent in Baku asked me if I was a terrorist. I’d arrived from Kabul wearing a beard and learned later that Azeris often refer to Salafis as sakkaliar, or “bearded people.” As an ultra-strict sect of Sunni Islam, Salafism in Azerbaijan is on the rise.
After 70 years of Soviet rule, when religious practice was driven underground, Islam is experiencing a revival in Azerbaijan. Almost 94 percent of Azerbaijan’s 8 million inhabitants are culturally Muslim, with about 70 percent of those being Shia. If religious practice waned under Soviet-enforced secularization, today, according to a 2004 survey sponsored by the U.S. National Endowment for Democracy, almost 97 percent of Azeri Muslims call themselves “believers.” Nearly a quarter of Azeris support governance by sharia (with higher proportions reported along the borders in the north and south) and nearly 30 percent apply Islamic codes to their family lives.
Even in Baku, where secularization imposed by Soviet fiat has been replaced by the secularizing effect of attracting foreign investment, Salafis are gaining in-roads. Amidst the city’s new five-star hotels, downtown shops displaying designer Italian suits, bars catering to the oil men, and the $40-a-night girls, the Salafis count up to 20,000 adherents. Mosques in Baku typically attract about 300 worshipers for Friday prayers. But Abu Bakr Mosque, the town’s Salafi mosque, attracts some 5,000 worshipers.
THE CAUSES OF THIS RISE of a visible Salafi presense in Azeri society are complicated, but they are explained in part by a combination of geographical and historical forces. And it has been pushed along by the fighting between Azeris and Armenians that erupted over the disputed Nagorno-Karabakh region when the Soviet empire began to buckle in 1987, along with the persistent conflict in Chechnya.
(The fact that Nagorno-Karabakh was home to a concentration of Armenians in Azeri territory is the vestige of the 1828 Treaty of Turkmenchay between Iran and Russia, which historically, along with Turkey, have had the greatest influence over Azeri fortunes. Azerbaijan’s first attempt at independence was short-lived, lasting two years between the 1917 collapse of czarist Russia and the invasion of the Red Army in 1920. Also a result of the 1828 treaty, today some 16 million Azeris live in northern Iran–almost a quarter of Iran’s population.)
By 1994, the year a cease-fire was achieved, the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict had left 30,000 dead, 20 percent of Azeri territory occupied, and up to 800,000 Azeris as refugees in their own country.
With fighting in both Azerbaijan and nearby Chechnya following in the wake of a collapsing Soviet Union, Baku became a revolving door for Islamic militants and drugs trafficking. With its access to the Caspian, what makes Azerbaijan good for commerce in oil also makes it good for trafficking in arms, Afghan opium, and mujahadin.
Some reports have gone so far as to claim that in the early 1990s mujahadin who were recruited from Afghanistan to fight in the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict were flown into Azerbaijan on chartered flights with the approval of the new secularist president, a former KGB officer named Heydar Aliev.
BAKU’S REVOLVING DOOR did not close with the 1994 cease-fire in Nagorno-Karabakh. Even into 2000, with a resurgent Russo-Chechen conflict, Azerbaijan remained a popular way-station for Afghan “asylum seekers,” just as it became a refuge for some 8,000 Chechens, many of whom were Salafis, escaping the pitched fighting to the north.
Not coincidentally, the Islamic Party of Azerbaijan was formed in 1992. By 1995, when their Shia leader was arrested on charges of receiving funding from and spying for Iran, the party counted as many as 50,000 members. That same year Iran established a department of its Intelligence Ministry–the same branch of the Iranian government responsible for supporting Hezbollah–to run espionage operations in Azerbaijan.
BY 1999 there were Sunni-Shia clashes in the northern city of Goychay. In an effort to stem the growing influence of political Islam, in 2001 President Aliev created the State Committee on Religious Affairs, which is charged with monitoring all religious activity in Azerbaijan.
The next year, what started as a protest over public services in Nardaran–a village about 10 miles east of Baku that is, with a shrine to the wife of the seventh imam, home to both a Shia pilgrimage site and the Islamic Party of Azerbaijan–ended with a deadly confrontation between townspeople and hundreds of police. Today, women in Nardaran wear the black chador common in Iran and buildings are adorned with murals depicting raised arms clinching blood-dripping swords and messages like: “There is no God but Allah!”
At the end of 2003 Ilqar Ibrahimoglu (nicknamed the “Azerbaijani Khomeini”), imam of the Jumaa mosque in Baku’s ancient Old City, and his community were evicted on charges of political agitation. (In Azerbaijan, all religious leaders are barred from political activity.) The mosque has since been converted to a carpet museum.
A FEW WEEKS BEFORE I’D ARRIVED, Azerbaijan had held its first election since 2003, which had resulted in President Heydar Aliev’s son, Ilham, assuming the presidency. The election was not without its problems. The younger Aliev received 80 percent of the vote amidst violent protests; international observers raised questions about fraud. The November 2005 parliamentary elections were widely seen as Azerbaijan’s chance to live up to their OSCE obligations by holding truly free and fair elections.
But the 2005 results were again cast into doubt. The opposition bloc, Azadliq (“Freedom”), cried foul as the OSCE reported that, “the ballot counting process [was] bad or very bad in 43 percent of counts observed.” The U.S. Mission to the OSCE wrote that, “there was widespread fraud in the counting and tabulations of votes,” and encouraged the Azeri government to hold re-runs of elections in certain precincts.
But Azadliq could not muster popular support and in the end the U.S. Embassy issued a tepid statement saying, “The United States looks forward to working closely with the newly elected parliamentarians.” People seemed resigned to business as usual.
AZADLIQ HAD FACED an uphill battle from the start. The opposition has lost every election since Heydar Aliev first took office in 1993. Along the way, more and more Azeris have simply opted out of the political process. In the 2000 election, 50 percent of the eligible Azeris voted; in 2005, only 30 percent voted.
One afternoon I had the chance to speak with Azadliq spokesman Ershad Nuriev. A chain smoker in his late 20s or early 30s, Nuriev was educated in the United States and is fluent in English. Around us sat middle-aged Azeri men drinking tea, playing backgammon, and talking politics. Nuriev expressed his concerns about the sinking level of voter turnout. He sees the diminishing political participation as indicative of a growing trend toward political Islam. “The Freedom bloc coalition is pro-Western,” Nuriev explained. “But it has lost its support among the people because the West did not support it.”
Nuriev pointed to President Bush’s May 2005 speech in Tbilisi, Georgia. “When Bush spoke he energized a lot of people who are democratic reformers throughout the Caucuses. Now the U.S. supports the OSCE findings that the elections were fraudulent. On the other hand, the U.S. Embassy’s statement says that the U.S. looks forward to working with this parliament. Why should people support a pro-West party that doesn’t get support from the West?”
“The Islamic factor is important here,” Nuriev continues. “When we do not get free and fair elections in this country, maybe people will think that if it’s not possible to change politics through democratic measures then maybe it will be possible to change politics by force. I think it is almost sure that we will have an Islamic movement here within five years.”
Drawing a historical parallel, Nuriev rhetorically asked, “Why did the Iranians have a revolution in 1979?” Answering his own question he continued: “Oil money was concentrated in the hands of a few families, political institutions were closed, and they had an undeveloped economic infrastructure outside of Tehran. Azerbaijan is a poor country. Over 40 percent of the population lives in poverty, 90 percent of the economy is based in Baku, and 86 percent is based on oil export. We need to develop the economic infrastructure outside of Baku so that people can have jobs. If people do not have jobs maybe they will start to look for other ways to make change.”
HAS THE UNITED STATES missed an opportunity to support a democratic movement in a Muslim country in the interest of stability? Would supporting a weak opposition bloc make Azerbaijan more vulnerable to the influence of Islamic radicals? With the rise of Sunni-Shia sectarianism in Iraq, with Iran thumbing its nose at the west, and with a very sensitive security issue in the BTC pipeline, whatever way one looks at it, there are powerful forces at work in Azerbaijan that may well come to grab our attention in the not-too-distant future.
“If democratic change is impossible,” Nuriev asked, “what is the alternative for a Muslim country? Now people are going to the square with orange flags. But maybe in five years they will go to the square with green flags.”
Peter Church is a writer who covers travel and international politics .
