Despair breeds contempt for politics in Azerbaijan

November 3, 2000
Web posted at: 10:12 AM HKT (0212 GMT)

By Peter Graff

BAKU, Azerbaijan (Reuters) -- A politician in a slick suit and a foreign car had just braved the muddy track to ask for their vote.

But Bakhtiyar Mekhtiyev, a musician driven from home seven years ago, wasn't interested.

"This isn't the first time we have voted, you know," he said outside the makeshift curtained chamber where his wife was tending their new-born baby, at the end of a crowded underground passageway in the cellar of an abandoned construction site.

"Funny, but after we vote, we never see them."

Azeris vote on Sunday to elect a new parliament and in theory their country is booming.

The ink is barely dry on oil contracts worth tens of billions of dollars. On the outskirts of the capital Baku, enormous villas are sprouting. Limousines prowl the city's cobblestone streets.

But six years after a shaky ceasefire silenced the guns in a war over the Armenian-dominated breakaway province of Nagorno Karabakh, one Azeri in seven -- nearly a million people in all -- have yet to return to the homes they were forced to flee.

They live in shockingly poor conditions, in railway carriages, dormitories, buses with boarded-up windows, and in this cellar, where rooms cobbled together from brick, shingle, curtains and cardboard branch off a muddy, rubble-strewn passageway.

Today is one of the days when there is electricity, so the passage is lit by a few naked bulbs. In a shadow in a corner of the hall, a little girl is urinating into a plastic bucket.

"How do you live without light and air?" asks Mekhtiyev. "Yesterday there was no electricity, so what do you do if you have a small child?"

Ignored by the world

With the war that made them homeless now fading into memory, Azerbaijan's displaced people are no longer on the world's immediate agenda.

In 1999, the U.N. refugee agency UNHCR appealed to donors for $12 million for Azerbaijan, and received $9 million. This year the agency received $4 million, of which more than half was a gift from Italian oil company Agip to build 400 temporary houses for families camping out in an abandoned meat factory.

"This is no longer seen as an unfolding disaster. It's a post-conflict situation," said UNHCR spokesman Vugar Abdusalimov.

But there is little chance of a quick solution that will let the displaced return home. Talks aimed at resolving the conflict have made little headway.

Since the Armenians won the war, it is unquestionably the Azeris who suffer most under the status quo.

Above the cellar where Mekhtiyev lives, the abandoned construction site has become a three-storey shanty town. Children are playing. Someone has piled shearings of wool on to a table in a corridor.

Telli was born a year ago and lives in chamber at the end of the hall. She is sleeping on a carpet on a sofa in a tiny sweater and trousers.

Her grandmother, Sayara Izmailova, says the girl has had a digestive infection for two months and they just cannot seem to cure her.

"The children are born here and they get sick," Izmailova says. "We are all sick. We die from the cold."

Contempt for politics

Their situation, at a time when a conspicuous few are enjoying the good life, has made many of the displaced contemptuous of politics, a mood that seems to form the general background for the approaching parliamentary election.

The ruling Yeni Azerbaijan party hopes to win three-quarters of the seats, allowing it to name Ilham Aliyev, son of President Haydar Aliyev, as the new parliament speaker.

The plan will probably succeed: the opposition is divided, many of its candidates have been denied registration and ruling party candidates enjoy the state's organisational support.

But as long as such a large part of the population remains displaced and poverty-stricken, there is a risk of what Assim Mollazade, deputy chairman of the opposition Popular Front called in an interview "political nihilism."

Refugee Fatdakh Gusseinov points to a ruling party banner that reads: "Yeni Azerbaijan is the voice of the people!"

He scoffs.

"Voice of the people? What voice of the people do you hear in that cellar?"

Copyright 2000 Reuters. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.

For more ASIANOW news, myCNN.com will bring you news from the areas and subjects you select.

See related sites about Central Asia
Central Asian media sites

Note: Pages will open in a new browser window

External sites are not endorsed by CNN Interactive.