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| Azerbaijan looks to Ataturk as model for the future |
| 2005-06-06 |
| Between a supermarket and a hardwarestore on a busy street close to the centre of Baku, a poster high on an advertising hoarding provides a glimpse of what the emerging hub of the Caspian Sea oil industry might yet become: a country built in the image of one man. The poster displays portraits of Heydar Aliyev, Azerbaijan's late president and, in the words of his son, "founder of an independent Azeri state", and of Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, who really did create the republic of Turkey from the ruins of the Ottoman Empire. That the supermarket is Turkish-owned is not coincidental. The juxtaposition of these two men is no accident either. Azerbaijan and Turkey are bonded by ethnicity, language, religion and culture. Both countries emerged from empires - Azerbaijan from the Soviet Union, Turkey from its Ottoman imperial past. Now, a growing cult of personality around Aliyev bears striking parallels to, and may be a conscious attempt to emulate, the cult of Ataturk, "father of the Turks", whose legacy still resonates in his country three generations after his death in 1938. In Baku, signs of the emerging cult of Aliyev, who died in 2003, are everywhere. His portrait glowers from posters at traffic intersections. The airport, schools and factories are named after him. His bust is in public buildings. Last week a vast oil pipeline that is the key to Azerbaijan's future wealth was solemnly inaugurated as the Heydar Aliyev Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan Oil Pipeline. The man guiding this memorialisation of Aliyev is his son, Ilham Aliyev, Azerbaijan's current president. At the ceremony to open the pipeline, Aliyev the younger gave an emotional speech in memory of his father. "He was the architect, the strategist of Azerbaijan," he told an audience that included the presidents of Turkey, Georgia and Kazakhstan. The old man was not present because "destiny has decided otherwise, but his ideas are eternal for us". Azeris are wearily familiar with the cult of personality from their days as citizens of the Soviet Union. According to some western observers in Baku, they may also be torn between their Soviet and Turkish heritage, giving the parallels between the personality cults of Aliyev and Ataturk added potency. Some Azeris make the comparison explicit. Samir Sharifov, executive director of the State Oil Fund in Baku, says that, just as Ataturk rescued Turkey from occupation and destruction after the first world war, Aliyev saved Azerbaijan from the same fate after independence from the Soviet Union and a war with Armenia over the disputed territory of Nagorno Karabakh. "Heydar Aliyev did for Azerbaijan what Ataturk did for Turkey," he says. Is the parallel justified? The two men could hardly be more different. Ataturk was one of the great figures of the interwar years in Europe, forcing Turkey to modernise and turn westward. His legacy today is a democratic Turkey. Aliyev was an apparatchik, the first non-Russian to head a KGB operation in a Soviet republic (Azerbaijan), who climbed the Soviet power apparatus to become a member of the Politburo. He was not the first president of independent Azerbaijan, but the third, coming to power in 1993 after internal unrest that he was instrumental in fomenting. He changed the constitution to allow his son to succeed him. Aliyev appears to have left Azerbaijan as a hereditary autocracy that "he rules from beyond the grave", as a western official in Baku puts it. Nasib Nassibli, director of the Foundation for Azerbaijani Studies in Baku, points out that Aliyev could have chosen to model his country on Turkey's democratic system. But, from instinct and training, "Heydar Aliyev didn't like the Turkish version of democracy." What appealed, instead, was the memorialisation of Ataturk, who has been dead for nearly 70 years but is still alive in Turkey. "The people of Azerbaijan need to feel that Heydar Aliyev is still alive," Prof Nassibli says. "Turkey has given us a very bad example." |
| Posted by:Dan Darling |