We appreciate your predicament, Mr Bond

Azerbaijan's oil riches have served to help establish it as a regional powerhouse, projecting it onto the international stage by hosting large events like Eurovision, the Azerbaijan Grand Prix and most recently the United Nations Climate Change Conference

Troy Nahumko

Tuesday, 3 December 2024, 11:24

The freshly laid blacktop rolled out from Baku across the dun Gobustan desert like a strip of electrical tape vainly adhering to the surface of a sandbox. Its very newness was a political statement against the antediluvian moonscape, complete with gurgling mud volcanoes, that stretched ... out from the bus's tinted windows. It was a Monday morning and the Highland Scots oil technicians sitting around me were regaling each other about their weekends in a shared language I could barely understand.

We saw them before they could even be heard. Tremendous dust storms raised up out of the desert as a pair of Apache helicopters buzzed past followed by two bigger transport helicopters. One of which landed in the middle of the highway ahead and disgorged a squad of troops that blocked the road. The American Secretary of Defense, Donald Rumsfeld, was visiting the gas terminal where we were headed, and it was about to be inaugurated.

We weren't going to work today. Geopolitics had literally landed in our path out in the wastelands of Azerbaijan.

It's been 20 years since that pipeline opened the flow of gas from the Caspian to its terminus in Turkey. Then, that highway was the only new road to have been built, let alone repaved, since the USSR had collapsed some 15 years prior. Now, after 20 years of gas revenues, the petrocity on the finger-like peninsula sticking out into the world's largest inland sea looks like Dubai on the fringes of the Central Asian steppe.

Its oil riches have also served to help establish it as a regional powerhouse. Projecting it onto the international stage by hosting large events like Eurovision, the Azerbaijan Grand Prix and most recently the United Nations Climate Change Conference. The second consecutive year the conference has been held in a fossil fuel dependent state.

Azerbaijan's autocratic president Ilham Aliyev took over the reins of the small ex-Soviet nation more than 20 years ago from his father Heydar Aliyev. Himself a former high ranking KGB officer who morphed into a Bond-style Central Asian strongman. The type with shark tanks in their plush offices who enjoy boiling opposition figures and journalists in vats of oil.

His son has tempered down some of those strongman excesses but continues to maintain a tight grip on the country, prompting the OSCE to state that the recent parliamentary elections "did not offer voters genuine political alternatives and took place within a legal framework overly restrictive of fundamental freedoms and the media..."

This week Aliyev told world leaders gathered for COP29 that natural gas was a "gift from God" and that the country shouldn't be blamed for bringing it to market. He went on to expose hypocritical Western governments who buy his gas and lecture him about torching the planet, "Unfortunately double standards, a habit to lecture other countries and political hypocrisy became kind of modus operandi for some politicians, state-controlled NGOs and fake news media in some Western countries."

In a country where elections are controlled and rigged, the average Azeri can't be blamed for having a climate denier as leader, but for those of us who supposedly have free and fair elections, what's our excuse?

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