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March 3, 2012

By Elmar Chakhtakhtinski

The events of March 1 in northern Azerbaijani town of Guba seem to have caught everyone by surprise. The protests were sparked by a YouTube video showing the provincial governor issuing insulting remarks about the locals during a public meeting. But the rather unexpectedly strong reaction apparently reflects a deep simmering popular discontent with the ruling Aliyev regime. It also reveals the disastrous results of government policy towards the country’s regions. Finally, it has serious implications both for Azerbaijan and the international community’s approach to that country.

Azerbaijan’s regions (“rayons”) are run very much like feudal fiefdoms by the local administrative governors (called “head of executive power”) - unelected officials appointed directly by president Ilham Aliyev, who can also remove them at his will. Thus, these individuals serve and show personal loyalty only to the ruling regime, with no accountability to local people whom they govern. Unquestioned obedience, huge portraits and statues of the president and his late father, the regime’s founder Heydar Aliyev, at every major highway and city center, opening and ending all public speeches with prayer-like standard praises towards the ruling family - are the hallmarks of this system. In return, the governors get to single-handedly rule the regions, plunder the riches, collect bribes from the population, appropriate public funds and assets, as long as they share the loot with the heads of the regime in Baku.

Some of the powerful minister-oligarchs, themselves under Iham Aliyev’s tight control, are assigned to a “patronage” over certain regions, with the president appointing their close associates to the governorship. This mafia-like setup is further strengthened by the fact that almost all of the regions are ruled by individuals from other parts of the country, to estrange them from local population and keep their allegiances exclusive to the regime. One notable exception is the remote Nakhchivan region, but there the local native despot Vasif Talibov has already passed the Aliyev “loyalty test” by implementing policies so repressive, brutal and bizarre that Nakhchivan has been dubbed “Azerbaijan’s North Korea” by international observers.

The object of protesters’ fury, Guba governor Rauf Habibov, is a close associate of the minister of transportation Ziya Mammadov, who was named in Wikileaks reports as one of the most powerful corrupt oligarchs and the head of the third richest family clan in Azerbaijan. His family’s name was also made known by the media reports about the adventures of his son Anar Mammadov, cited for paying one million dollars to grill and eat a bear from a zoo in one of the local restaurants and for being kicked out of Dubai for debauchery. As a side note, in a bizarre twist, lately Anar Mammadov has become involved with lobbying activities in the US and heads a Washington-based NGO Azerbaijani-American Alliance.

While Habibov’s houses in Guba have been torched by protesters, Ziya Mammadov still owns large properties in that region. Perhaps attempting to avoid a further escalation of anger from the locals and the ensuing threat to his own holdings, he was seen on a YouTube video personally apologizing for any insults that his protégé Habibov might have uttered.

However, neither Habibov’s own apologies nor the ones offered by Mammadov satisfied the residents of Guba. Not only protesters in this provincial town came out in thousands, in numbers greater than any public protest held since 2005 even in capital Baku where over three million people live, but they also stood up to the attacks by security forces against peaceful demonstrators, with some groups within the crowds responding to police violence by burning down houses belonging to Habibov and forcing him to flee and resign from office.

Some videos posted online show the furious residents destroying household items and setting the buildings on fire. Nobody is seen attempting to rob the place – only an angry act of destruction inflicted to the possessions of the regime’s regional head. The scale and depth of resentment seem to go way beyond a mere reaction to the insulting remarks, but rather present a boiling point for the people long fed up with the current state of affairs.

As a confirmation that the regime comprehends and tries to hide the broader causes for Guba protests, another YouTube video clearly shows that persons inside the police forces have been holding portraits of the president Aliyev, while no such pictures can be seen among the crowds of local protesters. This might indicate a desperate (and poorly implemented) attempt by the authorities to display the events in Guba as a limited discontent with a “bad local vassal”, while people are still “admiring the benevolent leader” of the regime.

Guba events dispel the claims about the perpetual stability and content of Azerbaijani population with the current political system – the line that the regime, its apologists and some analysts have long propagated. Regardless of what happens next in Guba, Ilham Aliyev’s angry assurance that “you will not see it [Egypt events repeating in Azerbaijan] regardless of your desires” in response to a question posed to him at the World Security Conference in Munich in February, might now seem further from being guaranteed.

These developments demand proper attention from the international community, particularly from the Western powers. As Arab spring showed, even seemingly the most stable regimes can quickly crumble, causing considerable bloodshed and uncertainty for the regional and global stability. The calls for restraint, threats of diplomatic repercussions, followed by sanctions and isolation seemed to have been coming one step too late to be able to stop further escalation. In Egypt this led to hundreds of deaths, in Libya - to a full scale civil war with foreign military intervention, and in Syria, with thousands killed and demonstrations turned into an armed conflict, the world powers are debating how to respond.

Therefore, in case of Azerbaijan, to make sure that words and diplomacy reach any desired preventative effects, perhaps it would be wise for the US and the European governments to come out early on with very strong statements and appropriate pressure on Azerbaijani government indicating zero-tolerance for any violence against the protesters in Guba or elsewhere in the country.

* Elmar Chakhtakhtinski is the chairman of the Azerbaijani Americans for Democracy