One day to go

Trackback your posts on the election here | Post reports from the media here

While Nathan is away (Happy Birthday), I shall put up a couple of posts over the weekend, providing some updates on the situation in Azerbaijan, where parliamentary elections are taking place tomorrow.

Blogosphere:
Katy is in Baku and has started posting on Blogrel and on azerbaijan.neweurasia.net, where I have also put up a roundup yesterday. The neweurasia Azerbaijan blog will be updated continuously by Katy, Marianna and me.

Oneworld Multimedia also has comprehensive roundups here and here.

Riting on the Wall has some thoughts on the upcoming poll and promises to have some more to say by tomorrow.

General news:

Eurasianet continues its great coverage on the elections and will definitely be the place to get background information written by insightful people on the spot.

Two great background articles come from Vladimir Socor of the Eurasia Daily Monitor. His first piece focuses on the moderate opposition “that wants to see changes happen in an evolutionary manner” and get less media coverage than their radical peers, portrayed in the second article.

The campaign manager of the Democratic Party, Faramaz Javadov, is still in custody after Thursday night’s raid ont he party’s HQ, reports the BBC. The Independent’s correspondent has also covered this. With regards to the likelihood of regime change, the same article says that

…the millionaire Aliyev family dynasty, which has ruled the country with an iron fist for most of the past three decades and has multi-million pound property interests in London, has simply proved too clever and too willing to use force and intimidation.

I interviewed Razi Nurallayev, the head of YOX!, back in September, and some of his points might still be very useful in understanding that the reality on the ground is actually a little more complex:

• As the IRI poll implies, there is not a universal feeling of discontent in Azerbaijan. People seem more optimistic about their future than they are fed up with their present economic situation.
• Razi said that Aliyev is actually not the black-and-white despot, and unlike his father, he seems more reform-minded than many think. Taking into account that YOX is thought to be a more or less ‘radical’ youth organisation working for regime change, these words are very interesting. Aliyev is a difficult opponent, Razi told me. The economy is booming (though not a lot is trickling down to the average Azeri), the outlook looks even better, and it seems Aliyev is committed to tackle corruption.
• If there will be protests in Baku immediately after the elections, the police will disperse them, not refraining from using force. Unlike in Georgia, Kyrgyzstan and the Ukraine, where the police did not dare to harm the protestors (or allied with them), the Azeri police seems loyal to the government.
• The Sunday elections will be much fairer than the last ones in 2003.
• However, as I interviewed Razi back in September, before the frantic sackings of top government officials, he has probably a lot more to say now – especially about corruption and cronyism that has gone out of control in the run up to the elections (I’ll ask Razi to comment on that via Email). It seems that Aliyev is trying to surround himself with loyals linked to the family.

As the Daily Telegraph from London says:

The reform-minded economy minister was replaced with a man whose son is marrying the daughter of President Aliyev and his wife, who is said to be the true power in Azerbaijan. Her cousin is foreign minister, her father president of the military academy and her uncle is ambassador to the United States. They have turned Azerbaijan into a family business, where 27 of the 30 richest people are members of the government or related to the first family.

Meanwhile, President Aliyev has a quite different explanation as to why we saw so many high-rank dismissals lately:

“What would have happened if they achieved their goals? These are at least six or seven persons that see themselves as presidents. I can name them but you already know who they are. What would they be doing? They would have shot each other. This would have been a return to the early 1990s, when the legal power was being overthrown with guns. Criminal groups walked the streets and terrorized people. I have prevented all this. We will continue to thwart this just as decisively in the future.”

Georgia’s President Mikheil Saakashvili chips in and says that stability in Azerbaijan is crucial for Georgia and he wishes victory not to a single candidate, but the entire Azeri nation.