President of Azerbaijan Ilham Aliyev has actually obliterated the formal opposition, famous expert Thomas de Waal writes in his article “Azerbaijan’s Perfect Storm,” published on carnegieeurope.eu website.
According to the expert, many leading critics of his regime—human rights defenders, journalists, and youth activists – were arrested over the past two years.
“Only 20 years ago, Azerbaijan had a turbulent and chaotic political life, which was put to an end by the skills of the all-powerful Heidar Aliyev. [However] Ilham Aliyev, Heidar's son and successor since 2003, has never been the dominant monarch that his father was, more of the pivot at the center of the elite, the “first amongst equals,” and arbiter of disputes amongst top officials, who are also rent-seeking businessmen,” Thomas de Waal notes.
The Azerbaijani regime is no longer that homogeneous as it used to be, the author writes.
“In October, Eldar Mahmudov, Azerbaijan's long-serving national security minister—the head of what used to be the KGB—was sacked, along with most of his subordinates. There are many rumors as to why. One tells of a conspiracy with the former head of the International Bank of Azerbaijan—a relative by marriage of Mahmudov—to defraud the government. Or else, reportedly, Mahmudov was caught carrying out secret surveillance of fellow ministers and presidential officials,” de Waal writes.
According to him, the international context is worsening too. “Azerbaijan is in the middle of a (self-inflicted) row with the United States, after closing down almost all U.S. organizations in Baku and accusing Washington of fomenting a “color revolution” in the country. A bill threatening sanctions in response to human rights abuses was recently tabled in Congress. The row between Russia and Turkey, its two closest international partners, has put Azerbaijan in an awkward spot. (Only last year, Aliyev was convening a friendly meeting between Putin and Erdoğan in Baku.) Lifting of sanctions on Iran is a triple blow. It removes a major card Baku was playing with the West (that it was a bulwark against a hostile Iran), reinvigorates a regional power which has a number of quarrels with Azerbaijan, and depresses oil prices. Moreover, there is talk in Georgia of importing oil from Iran via Armenia, which would end Azerbaijan's monopoly on gas imports,” the expert notes.
According to de Waal, two more powerful sources of instability add to the picture of distraction and uncertainty. One is the unresolved conflict with Armenia over Nagorno-Karabakh. “Over the last few years, the ceasefire regime established in 1994 has deteriorated, Azerbaijan has acquired a fearsome new arsenal of weaponry, and the country has turned up the dial of bellicose rhetoric against the Armenians for occupying Azerbaijani land. The increasing worry is that an Azerbaijani regime that is in desperate straits might choose to “play the Karabakh card”—-the one grievance that can rally all Azerbaijanis around the flag—and start a military operation, large or small, to recover lost territory. In that case, the Armenians would be bound to strike back and a new and potentially catastrophic conflict in the Caucasus would break out,” the author writes.
The other one, according to him, is political Islam. Azerbaijan’s secular pro-Western political prisoners have captured most of the attention abroad. On December 28, one of the most prominent of them, famous journalist Rauf Mirkadirov, was sentenced to a six-year imprisonment on the charge of allegedly spying for Armenia.
But the majority of the prisoners in Azerbaijan are accused of political radicalism. Among them are Shias from the pro-Iranian village of Nardaran or Sunnis accused of supporting the Islamic State.
“Last year, the Azerbaijani government predicated its budget forecasts on $50-a-barrel oil. Now, President Aliyev faces the near-impossible task of how to buy off very different groups of discontented citizens with oil at little more than half that level,” the expert concludes.
