Long before Dubai, Brunei, Qatar, or Saudi Arabia, Azerbaijan was the original petro-state. It’s now controlled by the autocrat Ilham Aliyev, son of the previous autocrat and former head of the Azerbaijan KGB and the Azerbaijan SSR, Heydar Aliyev. The Aliyev’s have long been the west’s favorite dictators because they’re happy to sell oil and gas to the west, and better yet, to give western companies concessions to do it. People I speak seem ok with autocracy, because it’s stable and successful and peaceful, and the only thing you’re forbidden from doing is criticizing the President. As for me, I wouldn’t trade freedom-of-conscience for all the material goods in the world, so I can’t say that I relate. And it may be all of those positive things now, but like all petro-states, when the bottom falls out of petroleum prices (as it tends to do), God help them.
The peninsula on which Baku sits is a veritable wasteland. Not only is the oil and gas here plentiful, it’s close to the surface and cheap to extract. This is the original petro-state. Long before Arab oil was even an idea, Azerbaijan was a global powerhouse. In 1901, more than half of the world’s oil was coming from Azerbaijan. There are pumpjacks (the oil wells that move up and down and look like grasshoppers) covering the horizon. Left to itself, oil here pools on the ground. It was here that up from the ground come a bubblin’ crude. The environmental wasteland isn’t even a human-imposed condition like elsewhere in the USSR, like the Aral Sea. No, here it isn’t a matter of man polluting Mother Nature, but of Mother Nature polluting herself.
Ok, so it’s also a matter of man polluting Mother Nature.
Everything here revolves around petroleum and fire. The whole country smells like a gas station. Sulfur fumes periodically waft over the city. Sculptures in parks resemble flames.
The locals are quick to boast of the world’s only flame-shaped tower, as though it’s a triumph of engineering rather than merely a triumph of poor taste.
There’s a Zoroastrian temple for fire-worship. It was originally fed by naturally occurring vent, but nearby drilling ended that, so now fed artificially.
However, just outside the city there is a place where natural gas vents naturally. Interesting picture of orange rocks, you say?
They’re actually on fire. Ragingly on fire.
I’d love to tell you a story about ancient religions practicing here for ten thousand years, or some such thing (and I will, if you really want), but the truth is that they think this fire was accidentally started by a shepherd in the mid-1970s when he stumbled across the gas vent.
The first impression of Azerbaijan is very European. But once you go inside, it’s the tackiest place in the world. It’s also the whoringest place in the world. It’s famous for nightlife, but really they just mean there are lots of clubs and lots of hookers. The idea of sleeping with someone who, you know, actually wanted to, seems completely foreign to people here. And even though it’s Muslim, the beer flows here like Oktoberfest. The people here are incredibly friendly to me, as they’ve been almost everywhere I go. But, like everyone, there’s a darker side.
Everyone in the Caucasus has problems with someone else. Here, the enemy is Armenia. Turkey (on Armenia’s other border) and Azerbaijan both have closed borders with Azerbaijan. So to visit all three, I’ll have to travel from Georgia to Azerbaijan, then back to Georgia, then to Armenia, then back to Georgia, then to Turkey. And I’ll have to do in that order, because you can’t go to Azerbaijan if you’ve ever been to Nagorno-Karabakh, which is both the result and the source of the animosity. Tensions between the Christian Armenians and Muslim Azerbaijanis and Turks go back centuries. At the break-up of the Soviet Union, Nagorno-Karabakh was a majority-Armenian region within Azerbaijan. Nagorno-Karabakh tried to secede from Azerbaijan and join Armenia, and ethnic violence broke out. Azerbaijanis were driven from Armenia, and Armenians were driven from Azerbaijan. You can read all about it on Wikipedia, but long story short, Armenia/Karabakh won the contest, humiliating Azerbaijan. Today, Nagorno-Karabakh is in a state of frozen conflict. It’s de facto independent, though closely tied to Armenia, but unrecognized by any UN member state, including Armenia.
Zvi Rex once said, “The Germans will never forgive the Jews for Auschwitz.” To be sure, it isn’t an exact parallel, but Azerbaijan and Turkey will never forgive the Armenians for the genocide of the 1915. Further exacerbating the social psychological complex is the Azerbaijani humiliation in the early 1990s. Azerbaijan has 3 times the population of Armenia and 5 times the GDP. Yet Armenia presently controls over 10% of Azerbaijani territory. Aliyev has announced his determination to have it back, by force if necessary. To that end, Azerbaijan now has a military budget the size of Armenia’s total budget. Russia supplies both, and keeps a military base in Armenia, so the situation remains tentatively stable. But Aliyev seems determined to restore Azerbaijani pride. If Azerbaijan trips the Russian tripwire, it risks bringing Russia in. Which probably means Turkey, a full NATO member, joins as well, on the other side. Add in Iran (along the southern border of both countries), and the jihadi connections with the Azeribaijani side from the early 1990s, and a little bit of trouble here could have far-reaching global consequences. It may not be as sexy in foreign affairs circles as pan-Arab nationalism, Chinese domination of the South China Sea, or Russia choking off European gas supplies—but it’s very much a powder keg, and in a place where loyalties and alliances are less a matter of expediency and more a matter of fundamental self-identity.
And it’s getting worse. Russia and the west have spent the decade distracted elsewhere. Both countries were engaged in NATO’s Partnership for Peace program. In 2004, soldiers from many NATO PfP nations met in Budapest for language training, including two Azeribaijanis and two Armenians. One of the Azerbaijanis, Ramil Safarov, bought an axe one evening and spent the night sharpening it. The next morning, he entered the room if one of the Armenian soldiers and hacked him to death. He was arrested and convicted to life in Hungarian prison. During his interrogation, he said, “I regret that I hadn’t killed any Armenian before this…the reason why I committed the murder was that they passed by and smiled in our face.” In 2012, Safarov was extradited to Azerbaijan to serve the rest of his sentence. Upon arrival, he instead received a hero’s welcome. He was retroactively promoted, given an apartment and back-pay, and praised throughout the country. Such is depth of ethnic tension here.
In July and August of this year, shelling broke out along the border, resulted in 15 deaths. You can’t get to Nagorno-Karabakh from here, so I’ll have to head back through Georgia, but in a couple of days, we’ll look at the conflict from the other side.
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