The Crude Doctrine
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When I visited Azerbaijan this spring, Sardar Jalaloglu was still in prison, pending an investigation into his involvement in the October 16 protests. (Jalaloglu says that he had no involvement, nor did he attend.) He and scores of others still detained face possible prison terms of up to 12 years.
"I think the U.S. government has played a great role in this turmoil," Jalaloglu's wife, Fatma, told me, after describing how government thugs bearing Kalashnikovs beat her husband and dragged him from their home. "They have been the foundation of the Aliyevs' power in Azerbaijan. Before the elections, we were led to have great expectations from the United States. But they have smothered our democracy, and now we know we can't rely on them."
When Armitage made his congratulatory call on October 17, it is likely that Ilham Aliyev would have recognized his voice. For much of the 1990s, Armitage had cultivated close ties with the Aliyev family. Business in Azerbaijan follows a schoolyard logic: A close relationship with the ruling clique brings lavish rewards, which is why multinational companies pay top dollar for well-connected consultants.
Armitage, Colin Powell's best friend and second in command at Foggy Bottom, is no stranger to the murky world of American overseas adventurism. "Big, bald, brassy, built like an anvil, he looked as if he could step into the ring next Saturday at the World Federation of Wrestling," Powell wrote of him in his memoirs. It's an image that Armitage appears to cultivate: During the 2000 presidential campaign, he described his role on Bush's foreign policy team as "the guy with the mud, the blood, and the beer." Armitage was a Pentagon adviser to the Shah of Iran in the 1970s, and he held senior foreign policy and defense posts under presidents Reagan and Bush. The elder Bush chose him as secretary of the Army, but he withdrew his nomination, reportedly to avoid answering questions about the Iran-contra affair. Armitage declined to be interviewed for this article.
When Clinton took office, Armitage did what political appointees typically do when their party loses the White House: He set up a consultancy, Armitage Associates, to cash in on his name and Rolodex. As the former head of the U.S. government's aid effort for the region, he had already won favor with Central Asian heads of state, putting him a step ahead of the swashbuckling American oilmen who smelled money in the former Soviet Union. He seized the opportunity. His clients included Unocal, Texaco, and Japan Petroleum Exploration Co., according to financial disclosure forms submitted when he was appointed deputy secretary. All of these companies invested in Azerbaijan in the 1990s.
From 1995 until he took his post in the Bush administration, Armitage served on the board of -- and for a time co-chaired -- the U.S.-Azerbaijan Chamber of Commerce, an oil-industry-dominated group that promotes economic ties between the two countries. Ilham Aliyev has been a regular guest at its events.
The chamber's roster of advisers attests to the Aliyevs' ability to attract name-brand in-fluence in Washington. It includes former secretaries of State Henry Kissinger and James Baker as well as former Treasury Secretary Lloyd Bentsen and George Bush Sr.'s chief of staff, John Sununu. Among its trustees are former Assistant Secretary of Defense Richard Perle and Senator Sam Brownback (R-Kan.), a member of the Foreign Relations Committee. Cheney also formerly served as an adviser to the chamber.
Heydar Aliyev was known to like flattery, and under Armitage's stewardship in the 1990s, the chamber put a premium on caressing his ego, granting him awards three times for such accomplishments as "outstanding leadership." (Another prominent honoree was Cheney, who won the group's Freedom Support Award for his lobbying in the mid-1990s when Halliburton was negotiating several multimillion-dollar contracts in Azerbaijan.) Armitage also played into the Aliyevs' hands when he was invited to testify before Congress in 1995 and 1996, warning about potential Kremlin destabilization in Azerbaijan and urging a more robust American diplomatic role there. The advice was heeded both times.
Armitage maintained his friendly relationship with the Aliyevs after he assumed his duties at the State Department. In a speech to the chamber in 2002, he declared, "For a long time, it was the U.S.-Azerbaijan Chamber of Commerce that was the real link between our two nations. I think now we've got a pretty solid government-to-government link."
Indeed, not only did Ilham Aliyev get the U.S. support he needed after the disputed October elections, but the Bush adminis-tration has implemented the policies that Cheney, Armitage, and other Aliyev allies were advocating during the 1990s: restoring foreign assistance, supporting public financing for the pipeline, and tightening military and diplomatic ties with the regime, despite its record on human rights and democracy. Bush hosted Heydar Aliyev in the Oval Office in 2003.
In Baku, the American most vociferously criticized by Azerbaijani opposition politicians and human rights monitors -- besides Armitage -- is Stanley Escudero, a career diplomat who served as U.S. ambassador to the country from 1997 to 2000. These days, Escudero wears many hats in Azerbaijan. As an entrepreneur (he imports Heineken, among other ventures), as a consultant for multinationals (his clients include Texas-based Moncrief Oil and British American Tobacco), and as president of the Baku chapter of the American Chamber of Commerce, he trades in a commodity even more valuable than oil: close ties with the Aliyevs. He's even hunted wild boar and pheasant with Ilham.
"We welcome foreign businessmen," Isa Gambar, the Musavat Party's presidential candidate, told me. But Escudero's case, he said, raises questions about whether the former ambassador had used his position to develop connections with the regime that he is now using for business.
Over baklava and tea at his Baku villa, Escudero says he's been careful to abide by government ethics regulations since retiring in 2000. He does, however, admit to being an unabashed supporter of the regime. "Ilham Aliyev is pursuing what is precisely the right course for the country," he says. "When Heydar Aliyev returned to power in 1993, this country was engaged in a war with Armenia, in which it was losing territory on a daily basis. There were three separate civil insurrections in addition to the war. Inflation was running at 1,642 percent per year. There were no contracts signed with foreign oil companies. In the United States and elsewhere, pundits were writing off Azerbaijan as a failed state which would soon be divided between Russia, Armenia, and Iran. Heydar Aliyev brought this country back to existence."
He points out that many of the people who ran the country into the ground are the same ones who currently lead the Musavat Party. If they were to rise to power, he argues, the country would risk returning to chaos. While he insists that Aliyev is not a tyrant, he notes that "I really don't follow this sort of thing," when I ask about imprisoned opposition members. As for the stolen election, he says, give democracy a generation to ripen: "The fabric of societies like this one are inherently fragile, and if one tries to push change too fast, you run the very strong risk of rending that fabric."
Escudero knows the region -- he was a diplomat for more than three decades, serving in Pakistan, India, Egypt, and Iran before becoming ambassador to Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, and finally Azerbaijan -- and his views are vintage State Department. They reflect the commitment to stability that often steers American diplomacy -- the fear of just how bad things could get, or how radical the opposition could be, that persuades Washington to embrace "our SOB," which at various times has included rulers such as Saddam Hussein, the Saudi royal family, Iran's Shahs, and Indonesia's Suharto.
There is one diplomat who wins unanimous praise from opposition activists in Baku: Norwegian ambassador Steinar Gil. Last October, anticipating violence following the election, the gray-haired Gil and his wife, along with Norwegian Embassy staff, spread out around Baku to monitor the situation. "When one sees a lack of basic rights, it is our opinion that we should speak openly about that," Gil told me in an interview in his office in Baku's cobblestoned old city. "What I saw personally was quite excessive police violence," he continued. "But so far I haven't heard of any policemen brought to account."
I asked him about Deputy Secretary Armitage congratulating Ilham Aliyev the day after the violence in Baku. He drew his lips into a narrow smile and paused for a moment. "I wouldn't like to comment on that," he said. "We didn't make any statements congratulating anyone. We made it clear from the beginning that the election was falsified.
"The government's argument has been that 'you must give us time.' But the principle of one man, one vote has to be respected. You don't need 30 years to learn that." During the postelection wave of arrests, Gil used his official residence to provide sanctuary to a journalist and a respected local imam; they left when the regime agreed to refrain from mistreating them, though both were eventually arrested.
Mubariz Qurbanly, a prominent member of Parliament from Ilham Aliyev's party, says the government doesn't worry too much about Ambassador Gil, as Norway is "only a small country, like Azerbaijan." However, he says, "if the U.S. ambassador had done the same thing, we would have likely paid more attention, since the United States is big and powerful."
Ironically, Gil has even closer ties with oil executives than his American counterpart: The Norwegian state oil company is the second-largest investor in Azerbaijan. "When you have great economic interests, of course you are interested in stability," he says. "You can keep [stability] by force or repression, but if you want a predictable situation, you should work hard to create a truly democratic society. There's no contradiction between human rights and oil interests. Our oil company stands for the same values as the government of Norway."
David Case writes on the environment, international affairs, and adventure travel for such publications as Men's Journal, Wired, and Rolling Stone. He lived in Asia for five years during the 1990s and first traveled to the Caucasus in 1998 as a fellow of the Pew International Reporting Project.
