In the late 1990s, Azerbaijan was one of the strangest places I’d ever been. On the flight over, business class was packed with oil executives, while the seven of us travelling economy had the rest of the aircraft for ourselves. We landed at an airport cocooned in biting fog, and it was only after I was through customs that I discovered that it was one of the few international airports that didn’t have radar. I faced oil fields burning off in the Caspian Sea, the detritus of the Soviet Union slowly crumbling on every corner, and an absolute refusal to serve me anything that didn’t have meat in from every waiter that I met. Staying in the apartment of an absent apparatchik, I fell asleep every night uneasily amongst cheap varnished furniture and the smell of hair oil. I had no idea what the hell was going on.
My favourite bicycle pimp Simon Ostrovsky was based in Azerbaijan for a couple of years and has a far better grasp of what’s going on, although even he tends to look confused in the two reports he’s just filed for Al-Jazeera.
This first segment is sadly familiar to anybody with an interest in freedom of expression in post-Soviet countries – well, familiar apart from the story of the journalist who sewed his mouth shut as a prison protest – and that familiarity means that it’s unlikely to set the world on fire. Reporters without Borders reports that the “[Azerbaijan] regime frequently uses violence and threats against the media and the country came near the bottom of the 2006 worldwide press freedom index”, and Amnesty has more information on attacks on journalists.
This is bothersome because the Caspian Sea is only going to become more important in the near future, and the lack of a healthy media in Azerbaijan can only contribute to its instability. The internet remains relatively accessible, though, but even Global Voices Online can’t track down any Azeri bloggers; perhaps the forthcoming elections might spur a bit more activity.
This segment is much more substantial – Iranian broadcasters pushing their signals deep into Azerbaijan in a David and Goliath propaganda war. For those that don’t know, Iran has a substantial Azeri minority – up to a third of the Iranian population and perhaps twice the size of the population of Azerbaijan itself – and Azerbaijan hosts a number of refugees from the Islamic Republic next door. This one has it all – religion, nationalism, technology, oil – and you can probably guess how the story goes from there.
Now, President Ilham Aliyev met with Dubya in April 2006, and the report specifically mentions that the US has been slow to provide media funding as part of its support. So the question for all you conspiracy theorists out there is this: what’s more in the interests of the US right now, considering who lives next door – a corrupt and authoritarian leadership which can keep a tight grip on the country, or a more free but probably equally unstable nascent democracy in the region? Watch this space, and watch the clips – how often does Azerbaijan get 30 minutes on a mainstream news channel?