Azerbaijan’s Leaders Yield After a Rare Public Protest

Azerbaijan’s Leaders Yield After a Rare Public Protest - NYTimes



MOSCOW — In a rare outbreak of civil unrest in Azerbaijan, a crowd of angry protesters massed outside the home of a provincial governor on Thursday, demanding his ouster as the house was consumed in flames, apparently the result of an arson attack. The national government responded by dismissing the governor.
The trouble started when the governor, Rauf Gabibov, said in a televised interview that residents of the Quba district in northern Azerbaijan were “sell-outs,” in reference to sales of houses in a mountain resort area. Local media reports said the insult touched off the protest.
Observers of Azerbaijani politics said, though, that the insult was little more than a pretext for residents to vent the anger they already felt over corruption and their resentment of some personalities in the local leadership, who are appointed, not elected.
Street protests are closely watched in Azerbaijan, as in other former Soviet republics, out of concern that the unrest that swept through authoritarian countries in the Middle East could spread. Azerbaijan is one of the six former Soviet states with a predominantly Muslim population.
The country has been led since 1993 by Heydar Aliyev, a former Soviet Politburo member, and later by his son Ilham Aliyev. It is a major oil producer on the Caspian Sea and has good relations with the United States, acting as a way station for military supplies bound for Afghanistan.
Rasim Musabayov, an independent member of the Azerbaijan Parliament, said in a telephone interview from Baku, the capital, that the unrest on Thursday was local in nature and unlikely to spread. Protesters demanded only that Mr. Gabibov be dismissed, he said; they did not criticize Mr. Aliyev.
Mr. Musabayov said that resentment had been building against Mr. Gabibov, and that the insulting remark was merely a spark. In Azerbaijan, he said, “not every careless word leads to a riot.”
The country is worried about any unrest taking hold. The police routinely disperse even small street demonstrations, and the last major public show of dissent was seen in 2003, when the younger Mr. Aliyev succeeded his father, and in a subsequent parliamentary election.
Moving quickly to head off trouble this time, the central government announced the dismissal of Mr. Gabibov on Thursday evening, and several demonstrators detained earlier in the day were quickly released.
Videos posted online appear to show about a thousand men milling outside the burning governor’s mansion in Quba, which borders the Dagestan district of Russia. Dagestan has been beset with a low-level Islamic insurgency and ethnic conflict for some time.
The government sent armored vehicles to the area of the mansion on Thursday, according to news reports, and by late in the day the crowd was said to have mostly dispersed.
In December, protests and strikes in Zhanaozen, an oil town in western Kazakhstan, across the Caspian Sea from Azerbaijan, ended with at least 17 deaths and scores of injuries after the police opened fire on a crowd. Protesters there burned down the City Hall and the headquarters of a subsidiary of the Kazakh national oil company.