The September, 2010, report issued by the International Crisis Committee (ICC) entitled “Azerbaijan: Vulnerable Stability” creates the impression that from now on western organizations will utilize all their powers to redirecting Azerbaijan’s domestic activities on the path of democratization.

Azerbaijani legal rights groups have always complained about the lack of this, stressing that not only are the Azerbaijani authorities responsible for the deepening dictatorship in the country but that the international community looking on from the sidelines is also to blame. Two years ago, in an interview we conducted, Azerbaijani legal rights defender E. Zeynalov described the reasons for this double standard regarding Azerbaijani democratization.

“When it comes to relations with Azerbaijan, the international players are first and foremost interested in oil. In fact, oil remains their second and third interest as well.” What is interesting is that the report was published after the September 2 signing of a protocol between Russia and Azerbaijan by which the quantity of Azerbaijani gas sold to Russia would quadruple and at the highest price in the CIS ($245).  

From the joint press conference given by Medvedev and Aliyev it is clear that “there is yet more to come” - that the cooperation will be long-term, proving that what is being established is the “century of gas”, in line with clearly expressed Russian geo-political imperatives. It was back in the 1990’s that power generators ceased to solely be sources of energy.

The possibility to control them, in turn, opened up limitless vistas for the so-called politics of “counter-measure and pressure.” It turns out that, if up until recently, Azerbaijani gas symbolized the geo-politics of evicting Russia from the post-Soviet territories (a western presence in the South Caucasus), now, Azerbaijani gas has become the symbol of Russia’s return to the region.

As to how it happened, as reported in the ICC report, that today Ilham Aliyev has succeeded in establishing such oversight in all spheres, the likes of which weren’t even seen during the reign of his father Heydar Aliyev, is answered in a previous report by the same ICC. In passing, let me point out that the ICC is one of those international organizations where the descriptions presented in its reports of the existing situations in various regions and countries are rarely overlooked by those forces and individuals engaged in real work of international building and planning, and its proposed solutions, slightly modified, are incorporated at the core of decisions and resolutions regarding various nations. In the report issued by the ICC after the 2005 elections in Azerbaijan, it states that: “In the past, Azerbaijan’s international partners, the United States, Russia, the European Union, had come to terms with voter fraud, with the hope that the Aliyev regimes, both father and son, would guarantee stability in the country, would fight against terrorism, and would ensure stable supplies of oil.”

This new document was published at an interesting time, even if we do not take into account the aspect of the parliamentary elections that were scheduled for November, 2010, in Azerbaijan. At election time, it would be quite difficult to fix all the very severe evaluations of the hopeless situation, dominant in practically all aspects of domestic political life existing during the period before the elections, especially since the ICC, in the same report, notes that: “The international community has few levers to exert pressure on the Azerbaijani authorities, but it must do more to convince those authorities that it is in their best interests to see gradual liberalism and freedom take hold in the country.”

What would be the benefit to Azerbaijan by going down the road to liberalism when it seems that nothing more than motivate Ilham Aliyev to change the domestic and external conditions now so favorable to his regime? It turns out that there are two inducements right away. The first (as stressed in the report) is that Azerbaijan has already reached the peak of its oil-driven GDP growth rates, which ran as high as 35 per cent in 2006 but are expected to slow to about 3 per cent in 2010 and 0.6 per cent in 2011. If the authorities further delay reform, they may lose the ability to control future developments and meet growing public expectations.

Thus, if Azerbaijan’s winning card, the oil, is no longer in the deck (a card which has allowed international organizations, up till now, to “make do” with the absence of social and legal justice in Azerbaijan and the issuance of “toothless” statements recording numerous human rights violations), Baku will be facing a period of penalties in the near future. In the appraisal of the ICC, this is the benefit for Azerbaijani authorities taking the road towards liberalization – to preserve the possibility of oversight in the mid and long-term.

The second and it would seem a more important reason for Azerbaijan, according to the ICC, is that genuine steps towards reform could also engender a more sympathetic attitude from the international community towards his most important policy problem, the conflict with Armenia over Nagorno-Karabakh. What is amazing is that the legitimacy of the positions and claims in the debate surrounding the Karabakh conflict is directly tied to the level of democracy in the country. As if the members of the ICC do not know that this is not the case; that the recognition or non-recognition of a country’s independence has nothing whatsoever to do with a country’s level of democracy.

Or, you’d think they are not aware of the PACE resolution issued two years ago, almost immediately on the eve of Azerbaijani elections, where the exact opposite argument was made – that the possibility of the development of democracy in Azerbaijan was essentially weak due to the non-resolution of the Nagorno Karabakh conflict. (Resolution 1614, 2008).

The ICC report, in reality, could have been published after the elections, now fully predictable, in November. The recent union of the two opposition forces in Azerbaijan – the Musavat Party and the Azerbaijani National Front – will hardly change the outcome of the election. The fact remains that in the parliamentary elections the “New Azerbaijan Party” will again constitute a majority, since, as now described in the ICC report:

“Although President Aliyev exerts firm control over the government, he is not all-powerful. He depends on the elite to preserve his power, and unless a direct challenge is involved, he is not interested in revising the delicate balances within the system by removing powerful subordinates, even if he is unsatisfied with performance. As a result, domestic politics are shaped less by unequal opposition-government contests than by internal dynamics and occasional power struggles within the ruling elite.”

After making a series of recommendations to Azerbaijan, the ICC calls on international organizations, particularly the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, the Council of Europe, the European Union and individual foreign governments to: 9. Keep human rights high on multilateral and bilateral agendas with Azerbaijan, in particular by regular review of its commitments and by high-profile state­ments. 10. Insist on follow-up from the government in cases in which a judgment has been entered against Azerbaijan in the European Court of Human Rights. 11. Monitor closely and with a large contingent the November 2010 parliamentary elections.

According to the claims of several western analysts, non-democratic authorities strive to cooperate with Russia essentially because, in contradiction to western governments and structures, Russia does not organize examination periods. However, this accurate explanation has had little significance when they were making decisions in Azerbaijan about filling the “Russian geo-political containers” with their gas.