Word: aliyev
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When May began, Rakhat Aliyev, Kazakhstan's ambassador to Vienna, was the crown prince of the energy-abundant central Asian nation. He was married to the favorite daughter of Kazakh President Nursultan Nazarbayev, whom the country's newly rewritten constitution now allows to stay on as President for life if he so chooses. Aliyev had the crown squarely in his sights. As May ends, however, Aliyev's political, business and media empire is being unraveled; and he is a fugitive, placed on a criminal wanted list by his vindictive father...
...immediate cause of the family rupture was Aliyev's recent public opposition to the constitutional amendment that gave his wife's father such power. Nazarbayev explained the move as necessary to steer new reform and designed to enhance democracy in the country. Few expect, however, that Nazarbayev will ever step down. Nor did Aliyev, who is married to Dariga, until recently the President's ideologist and confidante (the couple are the parents of Nuralli, Nazarbayev's 22-year-old grandson and the apple of his eye). Nevertheless, the would-be President for Life had grown to detest...
...mistake Aliyev for a democrat. Though he acts like a political opponent, Aliyev can behave in crass and self-serving ways. Last September, before he opposed his father-in-law's new powers, Aliyev suggested that Kazakhstan become a hereditary monarchy - perhaps, say observers, to try to restore relations with Nazarbayev but also to set up Aliyev's own son Nuralli as eventual sultan of a new kingdom...
...Azerbaijan is sandwiched between two energy giants--Iran to the south and Russia to the north--allies and old U.S. foes whose reserves will last decades. The U.S. has three interests in Azerbaijan: securing energy, spreading democracy and fighting terrorism. Vafa Guluzadeh, a former adviser to President Heydar Aliyev, whose decade-long rule over Azerbaijan ended in 2003 when he maneuvered his son Ilham's succession, remembers translating a phone call from President Bill Clinton to his boss in 1994. "Clinton said, 'Mr President, we need to diversify the oil pipelines. We need a new route...
Azerbaijan might be secular, but it is hardly democratic. Local elections in 2005 and the presidential vote that brought Ilham Aliyev to power in 2003 were both flawed, according to U.N. and American election observers. A free press? Hardly. One afternoon in December, TIME's team was taken to a police station near Baku and questioned for three hours about our activities. In Baku, the late former President's face peers down from billboards, and a huge statue of him stands in one of the many Heydar Aliyev parks. On the third anniversary of Aliyev's death, in December, government...