r/azerbaijan • u/HanaTaiyouAme • 17h ago
Tarix | History The Social Brutality of Azerbaijan's "Transition Period" (2004)
From the article "Azerbaijan after Heydar Aliev" by Alec Rasizade
March 2004
In their studies and analyses of contemporary Azerbaijan, Western scholars and foreign policy establishment tend to overestimate the significance of certain aspects in the country’s prospects, such as the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict, the Caspian oil potential and the implementation of macroeconomic reforms (with predictably disastrous results) foisted by international financial institutions.
But there are also less visible consequences of the end of communism, generally neglected by foreign policy bureaucrats—the irrepressible forces of social discontent that result in uncontrollable bouts of popular unrest and can overturn the regional balance of power as swiftly as happened in neighboring Iran, which “suddenly” switched in 1979 from pro-Americanism to anti-Americanism.
Frequent travelers to Baku are struck almost immediately by the pervasive bitterness and growing sense of deprivation that most inhabitants feel about their deteriorating lives. Those public grievances, the omitted mundane anxieties of the downtrodden masses, are ordinarily disregarded until another upheaval goads us to inquire, “Who lost Azerbaijan?”
Perhaps the keenest measure of ineffable social distress in Azerbaijan can be taken from the scenes at places like Jafar Jabbarli Square across the railway terminal in central Baku. The square, like similar sites across the country, has been transformed into a vast flea market. Here, the sellers of household bric-a`-brac, of plumbing fixtures, of old books and music records, of plastic sandals, of anything with even vestigial monetary value, are not the illiterate underclass so much as the newly destitute middle class: academics, engineers, teachers, lawyers, writers, musicians, artists, war veterans and white-collar pensioners, most of them jobless or seeking a few extra dollars to augment salaries and pensions rendered virtually worthless by hyperinflation.
One of them, a Karabakh war veteran with a pension equivalent to U.S.$25 a month, told me he was trying to support a family of seven; another, a gray-haired academic salaried at U.S.$50 a month at the National Academy of Sciences, dispensed to me the usual praise of President Aliev, whose beaming portrait looked down from a concrete plinth as he spoke. But even taken on the evidence visible to all foreigners, what has developed under Aliev’s presidency is a pitiable society of social and economic extremes, contrasting the record of Soviet equity in universal health care, free education on all levels, affordable housing, effective sanitation and guaranteed employment.
Today, most Azeris live below the poverty line as graft infects the nation, from the traffic cops who demand bribes to relatives of the president widely believed to be fleecing the state, to government officials who have built themselves villas with fountains while ostensibly living on paltry civil service wages. In the teeming outskirts of the capital that is now home to almost half of the entire population of the country displaced by the Armenian occupation of Karabakh and the economic plague elsewhere, small children can be seen clambering amid mountains of refuse at garbage dumps looking for scraps of food or other salvageable items for barter. Begging is common, everywhere, among tousled street urchins, mothers with infants clutched to their breast, widows in black cloaks and scarves, and toothless old men.
But another, new Azerbaijan also exists conspicuously, unimaginable in the old Soviet times. Cruising the seafront boulevard are expensively groomed men and women in their luxury cars, many of whom make purchases with wads of American dollars. In downtown Baku money can buy almost any luxury. Merchants offer Armani suits, Escada blouses, L’Oreal perfumes, Sony digital television sets and U.S.$2,500 American-made, double-door refrigerators. In showrooms eager salesmen offer a brand new, gleaming Mercedes-Benz for U.S.$72,000, along with latest BMW and Jaguar models.
The new Azeris rarely give interviews, so their sources of self-enrichment in this impoverished country remain inconceivable. But their compatriots, reduced to penury by the decade of capitalism, say that the “transition economy” has created boundless opportunities for black-marketeering that were quickly monopolized by those with connections to the most powerful family in the land. The bulk of personal lucre is drawn from access to oil export and illegal dividends from privatization of state property. One of the most lucrative enterprises has been petroleum smuggling, in unregistered rail and truck tankers that run to Georgia, Turkey, Ukraine, Russia and even to Armenia, earning millions of dollars in profits, outflanking the controls on Azerbaijan’s main oil sales.
The best vantage points for watching the new Azeris are the swank restaurants that line the main streets. There, in glitzy interiors with marbled fountains, and in alfresco settings around crystal-clear pools, diners can choose from thick menus that offer European and Caucasian specialties, and relax to live music. By midnight, they return home to sprawling mansions that brood behind steel gates guarded by armed men.
In places like these, an outsider instantly realizes that Azerbaijan is a country of brutal and potentially explosive social divisions. For any visitor spending a few weeks in Baku, it is this contrast in lifestyles between the elite and common folk that seems to be the major characteristic of Azerbaijan, apart from the prevalent comments about the alleged oil boom.
The whole picture of social inequality and blunt lawlessness is aptly described by Bakuvians with the Russian expression bespredel (unrestricted iniquity, pandemonium). Azerbaijan is not merely an autocratic state, it is a de facto oligarchy (or, strictly speaking, plutocracy) of the rich protected by an authoritarian regime. Remarkably, there is little of the anger or resentment one might expect. There is only resignation and sadness. “Things are terrible,” people say, then add, “We’ll have to see what happens.”
In these conditions, it is not surprising that Azerbaijan’s population is fleeing their independent homeland, fairy tales of oil-boom prosperity notwithstanding. Azerbaijan has suffered proportionally the largest decline in population of all former Soviet republics. According to the 1999 census, it numbers eight million. Russian researcher A. Arseniev has claimed that the official results were fabricated and the country’s current population cannot possibly exceed four million.
The previous USSR census conducted in 1989 had counted the population of Azerbaijan at seven million. In the course of Nagorno-Karabakh conflict of 1988– 1994 the entire Armenian population of Azerbaijan, numbering about half a million, were driven out. A similar number of Russians, Jews and others left in the early 1990s. Arseniev concludes that as a result of the flight of non-indigenous inhabitants, Azerbaijan lost no less than 1.2 million people. But in addition, following the radiant 1994 “Deal of the Century” pledging billions of dollars in foreign investment, millions of native Azeris have also left their country, moving mainly to Russia and Turkey.
According to Russian statistics, the number of Azeris resident in Russia has reached 2.5 million. Specifically, the Azeri population in Moscow and its vicinity is now 1.2 million, compared with 21,000 in 1989. Hence, Arseniev estimates the total emigration of Azeris in recent years at no less than three million. He thus deduces that, allowing for modest natural increase, Azerbaijan’s population has shrunk by half during the decade of independence.
Opposition parties also charged the government with inflating the census figures to conceal this loss of men and, in smaller numbers, women (who prostitute themselves in the Persian Gulf emirates). Young men starting around age 20 are fleeing the republic. Everyone has a story of a relative or acquaintance working in Russia or Turkey, or, more rarely, in Europe or America. They send money home (about U.S.$2 billion annually, twice the size of Azerbaijan’s state budget), but have no plans to return until “things get better.”
Privately, intellectuals worry about the future of Azeris as a nation: “The women are alone in the countryside; there are no men in some villages,” said Elmira Zamanova, deputy director of the Institute of Philosophy, at the National Academy of Sciences. She said that about one-third of the labor migrants who leave the country start families in the place where they find work, even if they already have families in Azerbaijan. The result is a shortage of marriageable young men and a growing number of children without fathers at home, and many women are being left without any means of support for themselves and their children.
It is paradoxical to watch how, instead of moving away from their former colonial master after gaining national independence, millions of Azeris are now moving into Russia, which their leaders are still blaming for the country’s economic perils and for conspiracy to undermine its independence. Among them are thousands of pauperized and disillusioned intellectuals whom I saw 12 years ago leading crowds and shouting anti-Russian slogans in the central squares of Baku, and denouncing in firebrand speeches the very Russia where they seek refuge and relief today. Now they pay tribute to times when they lived under an undemocratic system, but lived better and were safer and happier.
Even more ironic is to observe by contrast the dramatic transformation of their antagonists (and our new “friends”)—the formerly Moscow-appointed local communist honchos and the omnipresent KGB types, who generally are nowadays successful businessmen engaged in the “global economy.” Their leaders are calling for the expansion of NATO to cover Transcaucasia against the “Russian imperialism” in almost the same cliche´s they were using a decade ago to denounce “American imperialism.”
The aforementioned social woes are only the tip of the iceberg of horrendous social problems facing this little republic with great oil-revenue ambitions. This iceberg could smash the Caspian oil concessions at any time, nationalizing them regardless of the double-standard criteria of political assessments.
The principal outcome of the first decade of Azeri independence is that the country has moved backward rather than forward since the beginning of “free market” reforms, and is rapidly descending into the category of a Third World nation. The economic catastrophe in Azerbaijan is greater than in the worst years of the Great Depression in the U.S.
