AUG. 26 2013 (The Conway Bulletin) — Azerbaijan has asked South Korea about buying military planes, warships and artillery worth $3b, media reported. The story first surfaced in a Korean newspaper and hasn’t been confirmed by Azerbaijan. Azerbaijan has spent billions of dollars on re-arming its military, mainly on kit from Russia.
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Copyright ©The Conway Bulletin — all rights reserved
(News report from Issue No. 150, published on Sept. 2 2013)
SEPT. 2 2013 (The Conway Bulletin) — In the end, Rustam Ibragimbekov’s bid to dislodge Azerbaijan’s President Ilham Aliyev from power didn’t even make it to election day on Oct. 9.
The country’s Central Election Committee disqualified the 74-year-old Oscar winning screenwriter on Aug. 27 for holding dual Azerbaijan-Russia citizenship.
Holding dual citizenship is clearly against election rules in Azerbaijan and Mr Ibragimbekov’s disqualification will be an embarrassment for the main secular opposition group.
It had been working hard to build momentum around the popular Mr Ibragimbekov. Now it has to start again.
Mr Ibragimbekov’s replacement is Camil Hasanli, a respected academic who teaches at Baku State University and used to be an independent MP.
Mr Hasanli, 61, may be a respected historian but he doesn’t have the same public persona, inside and outside Azerbaijan, as Mr Ibragimbekov.
What the candidate switch does do, though, is perhaps underline one of the main opposition group’s weaknesses. The impression it gives is of a movement built for the country’s Soviet-era intelligentsia, rather than being a vigorous opposition movement spanning Azerbaijan’s different social strata.
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Copyright ©The Conway Bulletin — all rights reserved
(News report from Issue No. 150, published on Sept. 2 2013)
AUG. 23 2013 (The Conway Bulletin) — Azerbaijan’s opposition has picked Camil Hasanli, a prominent Baku history professor, as a reserve candidate to stand in October’s presidential election.
The main opposition group was forced to confer this unusual status on Mr Hasanli, 69, because Rustam Ibragimbekov, the opposition’s preferred candidate and a well-known Oscar winning sceenwriter, is likely to be disqualified later this week from standing in the election.
Mr Ibragimbekov holds joint Azerbaijan-Russia citizenship which, under the election rules, is illegal.
Mr Ibragimbekov appears to have either not realised his dual citizenship could be a problem or not been prepared to relinquish it in time to officially register for the election.
Conspiracy theorists also allege that, as a favour to Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev, Russian officials have slowed up the process to cancel Mr Ibragimbekov’s Russian citizenship.
Either way, it looks bad for Azerbaijan’s opposition.
Making a dent in Mr Aliyev’s grip over Azerbaijan in the election was going to be difficult enough — he is running for his third term after 10 years in power and is almost guaranteed a large victory — but now it will be even harder.
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(News report from Issue No. 149, published on Aug. 26 2013)
AUG. 19 2013 (The Conway Bulletin) — Azerbaijan’s state oil company SOCAR wants to buy 5m tonnes of oil from Russia’s Rosneft, media quoted SOCAR chairman Rovnag Abdullayev as saying. The plan is to reverse the flow of the Baku-Novorossiysk pipeline to pump the oil to Azerbaijan where it will either be refined or exported to Europe.
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Copyright ©The Conway Bulletin — all rights reserved
(News report from Issue No. 149, published on Aug. 26 2013)
AUG. 13 2013 (The Conway Bulletin) — Relations between Azerbaijan and Russia have generally been cool for the past decade or so. Russian President Vladimir Putin’s trip to Baku on Aug. 13 only served to underline this.
Azerbaijan’s President, Ilham Aliyev, has looked to balance the interests of the country’s former master, Russia, with that of Europe, a major energy client. In previous years there has been talk of Russia buying up Azerbaijan’s gas supplies but this never materialised. Instead, Western energy firms have tightened their hold on Azerbaijan’s vast Caspian Sea energy supplies by buying up stakes in fields and building pipelines.
And despite rhetoric of improved ties between Moscow and Baku before a trip by Mr Putin, his first to the Azerbaijani capital in seven years, this general trajectory appears set.
Russia’s Rosneft had talked of an energy deal with SOCAR, the Azerbaijani state-owned energy company, but this never materialised. Sources told media outlets that a vague agreement had been signed but there were too many differences to commit to anything more meaningful.
These differences are varied. Some are personal, others strategic — last year Russia and Azerbaijan failed to agree on a lease extension for a Russian radar base — and others are commercial. Azerbaijan-Russia relations still need some mending.
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(News report from Issue No. 148, published on Aug. 19 2013)
AUG. 18 2013 (The Conway Bulletin) — An estimated 3,000 supporters of Azerbaijan’s opposition parties held a rare sanctioned rally on the outskirts of Baku. They waved placards and called for a fair presidential election in October. The mayor’s office only sanctioned the rally for the outskirts of Baku.
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(News report from Issue No. 148, published on Aug. 19 2013)
AUG. 7 2013 (The Conway Bulletin) — BP stemmed an output drop at Azerbaijan’s Azeri-Chirag-Guneshli (ACG) oil fields. In the first three months of 2013, ACG’s output was 662,000 barrels per day (bpd), rising to an average of 672,000bpd for the first half of the year, Reuters reported. ACG accounts for most of Azerbaijan’s oil production and is vital to its economy.
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(News report from Issue No. 147, published on Aug. 12 2013)
JULY 30 2013 (The Conway Bulletin) — Azerbaijani state energy company SOCAR (20% stake), BP (20%) and Total (10%) joined the consortium developing the Trans Adriatic Pipeline (TAP) that will pump gas from the Azeri sector of the Caspian Sea to Italy, TAP said. The other members of the consortium are Statoil (20%), Fluxys (16%), E.ON (9%) and Axpo (5%).
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(News report from Issue No. 146, published on Aug. 5 2013)
AUG. 2 2013 (The Conway Bulletin) — A pre-election spending spree on various social projects will push Azerbaijan into a budget deficit for the first time in a decade, Bloomberg quoted the ratings agency Standard & Poor’s as saying. Azerbaijan’s presidential election is scheduled for October. Ilham Aliyev is running for a third consecutive term.
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Copyright ©The Conway Bulletin — all rights reserved
(News report from Issue No. 146, published on Aug. 5 2013)
BAKU, JULY 29 2013 (The Conway Bulletin) — Three Azeri men — a psychologist, a photographer, and a software engineer — sat at a café in central Baku. As always, they ordered tea with jam.
Jam is an important part of the tea drinking tradition in Azerbaijan but, like Baku itself, this tradition is changing.
The waiter served the tea and then proffered the three men a plate of nuts and dried fruit. He then added a plate heaped with pastries and another with a tower of miniature Kit Kat bars.
The psychologist shook his head vigorously.
“Ludicrous,” said the software engineer. “It used to be different. You would just choose a type of fruit jam to eat with the tea.”
Tea in Azerbaijan is encased in tradition. Served in an armudu, a pear-shaped glass designed to keep the liquid hot for as long as possible, tea is shared between friends in cafés and served to guests upon arrival in homes.
But excess and bombast, by-products of oil wealth, are everywhere in Baku. Some say that the evolution of the tea service is just another expression of the showy development of Baku. Others, that it simply marks the development of tradition.
The software engineer had another theory. “It’s for tourists,””he said. “Or children.”
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Copyright ©The Conway Bulletin — all rights reserved
(News report from Issue No. 145, published on July 29 2013)