Word: azerbaijan
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...glance at the map shows why: 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...
Thirteen years later, Azerbaijan is one of the few Muslim countries to fight in Iraq alongside American soldiers. The U.S. has financed two radar stations in Azerbaijan, one a few miles from the Iranian border. U.S. Navy SEALs have trained teams to guard the Caspian's underwater pipelines, and U.S. Customs agents have overseen border and airport security systems. With Baku just a couple of hours' drive from Iran, "Azerbaijan could be the world's only secular country with a Shi'ite majority," says the State Department official...
...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...
...Azerbaijan grow richer without growing freer? Some Azeris believe Western governments prefer energy security to political freedom, as was sought in the 2004 revolution in Ukraine--a major transhipper of natural gas to Western Europe. "The U.S. will never support democrats in Azerbaijan because of their oil interests," says Guluzadeh. But Azeris might start to demand more democracy if oil revenues do not trickle down. The country is listed as one of the world's most corrupt by the Berlin-based Transparency International. "The average citizen is very suspicious of the government," says a Western official in Baku...
...barely recognizable from those days when he earned $10 a month on that offshore Soviet rig. Since joining the pipeline project in 2003, he has bought a car for himself and for his father, who worked in Soviet oil production for 30 years. But the real test of how Azerbaijan has changed will be the future of Mirza's daughter, who is now 10. "When all our oil is finished, say, in 50 years from now, there should be no problems for her." So until then, party on, Baku...