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Wall Street Journal
November 6, 2002
Potentate Jr.
By CLAUDIA ROSETT
Ms. Rosett is a member of the Journal's editorial board.
Interviewing dictators has its awkward aspects. They pack heady power, they project the pride of those with favors to dispense, and up close they can be charming. It can feel like sheer bad manners to pry into the political closets.
Interviewing Azerbaijan's Ilham Aliyev, during his recent trip to Washington, was almost that bad. The 40-year-old Mr. Aliyev is not a dictator -- not yet. But in the murky politics that bedevils most post-Soviet states, he occupies an intriguing niche. In a country ranked by Transparency International as one of the most crooked on earth, worse than Egypt, Russia or Haiti, Ilham is a dictator-in-training, the only son of Azerbaijan's autocratic president, 79-year-old Heydar Aliyev. While post-Soviet rulers from Tbilisi to Tashkent have rarely shrunk from family involvement in politics, the Aliyevs have the distinction among this crowd of pioneering a path toward an actual dynasty of despotism.
That's not what America's foreign policy is supposed to be encouraging these days. But the fact is that Ilham's great expectations -- as likely inheritor of an entire oil-rich nation -- confer a definite luster when he travels to Washington. He arrived there late last month with a slew of high-level appointments on his calendar and a retinue of cameramen to broadcast footage of his prestige to the eight million people back home. He gave a talk at Johns Hopkins University. He was guest of honor at a fancy dinner that pulled in senior folks from Big Oil . He met with Spencer Abraham, Richard Armitage and Dick Cheney.
When I caught up with Mr. Aliyev, he had lunched earlier that day with a group of high-profile has-beens including Madeleine Albright and Brent Scowcroft. Over tea and apricots at the Embassy of Azerbaijain, he told me he was in Washington to exchange views on "energy development" and "our activity in the antiterror coalition." He said he was enjoying a warm welcome.
There's plenty for Americans to appreciate in turn. Azerbaijan, with its mostly Muslim population, is one of the friendliest states in the Islamic cosmos, pals not only with the U.S. but with Turkey and Israel. Sandwiched between Russia and Iran, beside the vast vat of petroleum that is the Caspian, Azerbaijan has a secular government, huge oil reserves and a helpful stance toward the war on terror -- letting U.S. warplanes use its air space this past year. As dictators go, Ilham's dad is neither as nuts as Turkmenistan's Saparmurat Niyazov nor remotely as ruthless as, say, Syria's Bashar al-Assad.
Ilham is easy to talk to. Tall, mustachioed, soft-spoken and clearly at ease with his tailored suit, gold watch and camera-toting entourage, he is fluent in English, French and Russian. He sees himself as working to build a modernized Azerbaijan, a place, he says, "where people will live free and without fear." Certainly, Mr. Aliyev is working hard, though whether a free and modern Azerbaijan will be the end product is debatable. Since his father became president in a quasi-coup in 1993, Ilham has become prime mover and first vice president of the lucrative state oil company; a member of parliament and first deputy of the ruling party; head of the national Olympic committee; and leader of Azerbaijan's delegation to the Council of Europe. "It's very difficult to have so many responsibilities," he says, but "I'm a very responsible person."
Ilham's father also has a record of responsibility, tracking back to his 13 years as Communist Party boss in the capital, Baku, from 1969 through 1982, followed by five years as a member of the politburo in Moscow. Young Ilham grew up as a member of the Soviet aristocracy, the nomenklatura. He studied and later taught at the elite Moscow State Institute of International Relations. After the Soviet collapse in 1991, he spent a few years in business.
Azerbaijan, during that early post-Soviet stretch, had a fling with democratic rule under Abulfaz Elchibey. The period was dogged by fighting with Armenia, its bellicose neighbor. In 1993, President Elchibey was run out of his job by an uprising that ended with the senior Aliyev seizing the power he still wields today.
Asked about dynastic plans, Ilham defers to his father, whose portrait looks down from the wall. "He will run for the presidency in 2003, and I'm sure he will win." After that, "it is not already fixed who will succeed." In any case, explains Ilham, "I think we have free elections already," and beyond that, "we should put a distinction between the way people govern their country and the way they are elected."
He explains that Azerbaijan's had a tough time since the Soviet collapse, and "we must be realistic, we must go step by step." Perhaps. But even more realistically, it bears noting that Azerbaijan's government has so far offered citizens no chance for genuinely democratic change. Human Rights Watch notes that in the matter of holding fair elections, Baku has failed "spectacularly." The latest State Department World Report charges the regime with strictures on free speech and elections, arbitrary arrests, torture, and deaths in custody. And Freedom House warns of "widespread concern that the country's fragile stability will be put in jeopardy when the time for a change in leadership arrives."
That may be some way off, depending on the health of Ilham's father, whose presidential Web site carries the slogan: "Years Gone By, Years Ahead." But whatever the timetable, Ilham's tour of D.C. has been playing in Azerbaijan as a sign that the U.S. approves of his role as No. 2 in Baku. Rude though it might sound, his hosts would have done better, even while welcoming Ilham, to remind both him and his countrymen of what is supposed to be a new axiom of U.S. policy: that true stability and friendship do not flow from dictators and oil , but from democracy.
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