Armenian Reporter:

Wikileaks: Mafia-style Azeri regime fanning anti-Armenian PR

Published: Tuesday December 14, 2010

Donald Lu, until recently the top U.S. diplomat in Azerbaijan, offered a damning portrait of the Aliyev regime. Official photo

Washington - When not busy siphoning off billions in country's wealth, spending fortunes on vanity pursuits or fighting domestic opponents, Azerbaijan's political elite is actively promoting anti-Armenian projects, cables from U.S. Embassy in Azerbaijan first published by the Guardian and made available by Wikileaks show.

Three dossiers prepared by former U.S. Charge in Azerbaijan Donald Lu in 2009 and early 2010 paint an unflattering portrait of Azerbaijan's President Ilham Aliyev, his spouse Mehriban and fellow cohorts who are compared to a mafia that runs the country "in a manner similar to the feudalism found in Europe during the Middle Ages."

Lu worked in the Baku embassy since 2007 as deputy chief of mission and served as acting ambassador from 2009 until his departure last summer. Between 2001 and 2003 Lu was State Department's deputy director for Caucasus and Central Asia; he is now deputy chief of mission at U.S. Embassy in India.

"Corleone on the Caspian" may rule for decades

In one of the more colorful cables released by Wikileaks and dated September 18, 2009, Lu cites a U.S. embassy source familiar with Azerbaijan's regime practices who likens the Aliyev family to fictional Corleones of Mario Puzo's classic "The Godfather."

According to the source, Ilham Aliyev was less the "reformist" Michael Corleone that many Western observers initially expected and more like Vito Corleone's other more hard-line offspring Sonny (who in Puzo's book eventually meets a violent death).

Lu notes that Aliyev demonstrated his "exceedingly thin skin" when "Radio Liberty had mocked his plan to build the world's tallest flagpole in the Baku port area." The flagpole was installed last September but its record is currently in jeopardy as Tajikistan is building a flagpole that is a few meters taller.

The cable also blames Aliyev's "thin skin" for the widely-publicized imprisonment of two Azerbaijani bloggers who mocked the government in a YouTube video. The two were recently released after more than a year in prison and amid intense U.S. pressure, including in a meeting between President Obama and Aliyev last September.

Lu's source who brought up the Corleone comparison suggested that Ilham's father and predecessor "Heydar [Aliyev] would never have allowed himself to be goaded into [such] ridiculous reactions" when similar situations arose under his rule and that Ilham is "not inclined to subtlety or deliberation in his response to these kinds of issues."

(The name of the source was not made public, but source's description - "witty, but somewhat past-his-prime" official who worked for Aliyev senior - is likely to betray the source as Vafa Guluzade, who was senior presidential advisor between 1991 and 1999. In an earlier cable Lu identifies Guluzade (or Guluzadeh) as a source that he consults.)

But in Lu's judgment, compared to his domestic abusiveness, Aliyev has been more constrained in his foreign policy.

"For all his bluster about Azerbaijan's legal right to liberate the Armenian-occupied territories by force, Aliyev has worked constructively on the Minsk Group-proposed Basic Principles and developed a reportedly good rapport with Armenian President [Serge] Sargsian - in contrast to the much more confrontational relationship between the countries' foreign ministers," Lu argues.

"Similarly, even as Aliyev regards with horror the prospect of Turkey-Armenia rapprochement ahead of Nagorno-Karabakh resolution," the cable continued, and Aliyev is highly critical and suspicious of the Turkish government, he would never seriously contemplate cutting oil and gas export through Turkey.

Lu concludes that "the rule of 47-year old Ilham Aliyev could continue for decades," particularly after elimination of term limits that "strangled the hopes of any and all pretenders to succession, including his wife (who in Azeri politics is thought of as a rival Pashayev, not an Aliyev)."

Luxury shopping, vanity projects, anti-Armenian propaganda

In two subsequent cables written in early 2010, Lu describes two of Azerbaijan's most powerful groups that control much of the country's economic activity: the Pashayev family of Ilham's spouse Mehriban, and the Heydarov family led by long-time Heydar Aliyev loyalist Fattah Heydarov and his son Kamaleddin, the emergencies minister. (Lu promised to prepare a third in a series of "Azerbaijan: Who owns what?" about the Mammadov family led by transport minister Ziya Mammadov.)

In a cable dated January 27, 2010 Lu describes the Pashayevs as Azerbaijan's most influential family commanding a "vast empire" of business interests in real estate, including Baku's The Four Seasons and J.W. Marriott franchises, banking, media, and telecommunications, as well as Baku's so far only Bentley dealership.

But it is the Heydar Aliyev Foundation that serves as the main promotional vehicle for Mehriban Aliyeva.

"Much funding [from the Fund] seems to be geared towards efforts to explain Azerbaijan's side of the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict, for example in the form of books, brochures and other materials describing what they call a "genocide by Armenia" in the town of Khojali," Lu writes.

The Foundation has recently advanced moneys to a variety of programs abroad, including grants to France's Versailles Palace, the Louvre Museum and the Cathedrale de Notre Dame de Strasbourg.

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