Word: baku
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...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.' It was all a very strategic plan," says Guluzadeh, sipping coffee in Baku's Park Hyatt, where Western and Asian businesspeople fill the $250-a-night rooms...
...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...
...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 television channels aired round-the-clock programming...
...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, who did not want to be named. "But if the oil wealth is not distributed, you will see people wanting a change...
Back in the oil terminal outside Baku, Bala Mirza, the engineer at the computer monitor, says he has already reaped benefits from the new oil boom. His life is 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...