Yearbook 2010
Azerbaijan. BP and other oil companies drilled for new oil deposits in the Caspian Sea, and the country’s oil boom seemed to be prolonged. Critics found that Azerbaijan’s growing oil wealth contributed to increasing economic gaps and widespread corruption. According to the independent organization Transparency International’s corruption index, Azerbaijan ranked 143 out of 180 countries in the world. The oil money is used only with the approval of President Ilham Alijev and is mainly collected by the political elite. US media reported that a number of fashionable beach villas in Dubai had been bought for high sums in the name of President Alijev’s eleven-year-old son.
At the same time, unemployment, poverty and lack of community service were striking outside the oil-rich Baku. Tens of thousands of refugees from the war in Nagorno-Karabakh had still not been given proper housing, more than a decade and a half after the war.
According to COUNTRYAAH, Azerbaijan has a population of 9.981 million (2019). President Aliyev visited the United States in September and met President Barack Obama, who urged him to release the two bloggers sentenced to two and a half years in prison each for hooliganism. The two men had published a regime-critical satire in the form of a video in which a donkey held a press conference.
Ahead of the November parliamentary elections, the human rights group Human Rights Watch accused Azerbaijan’s regime of forcibly preventing free elections, imprisoning journalists and physically attacking reporters. According to softwareleverage, an Azerbaijani democracy group stated that many opposition candidates were removed from the ballot boxes, and opposition leaders were attacked and slandered in the media. In the election movement, campaign meetings were only allowed in certain places.
According to the Electoral Commission, the Aliyev regime’s party of power won New Azerbaijan and took 72 of the 125 seats in parliament. The president’s wife was reported to have been re-elected with 94.49 percent of the vote in her constituency. Many mandates went to independent candidates, almost all loyal to the regime. Only one elected candidate was known for his regime criticism, İgbal Agazade from the party Umid (Hope). Neither the People’s Front nor the Muslim opposition party Musavat got its leaders. Western electoral observers explained that the election had not been free, fair or democratic, with widespread electoral fraud, threats and harassment, double voting, full voting ballots and voting irregularities. The public front and Musavat demanded new elections.
In November, an imprisoned journalist, Eynulla Fatullayev, got part of his indictment dismissed by the Supreme Court. It was about rioting for terrorist offenses and ethnic animosity, which Fatullayev sentenced for 2007. However, the prison sentence for drug possession remained. Later that month, Adnan Hajizade and Emin Milli, the two bloggers convicted of the ass ass, were released.
- Abbreviation Finder: Check to see how the two letter abbreviation of AZ stands for the country of Azerbaijan in geography.
HUMAN AND ECONOMIC GEOGRAPHY
State of Transcaucasia. Azerbaijan, which at the 1999 census had registered a population of 7,953,438 residents (8,411,000 residents According to 2005 estimates), is affected by a very modest demographic growth for an Islamic country (and which is substantially part of the Near East), but higher than that of the other two Transcaucasian states (Georgia and Armenia). The share of the dominant ethnic group, that of the Azeri, has risen to over 90 %, while those of the Russians (1.8 %) and Armenians (1.5 %) have decreased.%); the latter, in particular, have been reduced due to the conflict between their country of origin and the Azerbaijan born from the Nagorno-Karabah question. On the other hand, most of the Azeris who resided in Armenia returned to Azerbaijan Despite the country’s mineral wealth (oil and natural gas), the living conditions of the population remain difficult: according to estimates by international organizations, in 2001 about half of the residents lived below the poverty line, and in 2004 110,400 people were registered as unemployed, but certainly the real unemployment rate is much higher, as is the share of the underemployed population. The not thriving economy of the Azerbaijan it is still largely founded on agricultural and pastoral activities, which however is accompanied by the extraction of oil, for which the area around the capital has always been known. THERE. it is part of that vast area of hydrocarbon production that has been identified around and within the Caspian Sea, also affecting three other former Soviet republics, Central Asian Kazakhstan, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan. In 2004 oil production in Azerbaijan amounted to 15.5 million tonnes, and that of natural gas to approximately 4.9 billion m 3. Between the end of the nineties of the last century and the first of the present century, the government signed agreements for the exploitation of hydrocarbons with large Western companies, and an agreement with Turkey, Georgia and Turkmenistan for the construction of a gas pipeline and an oil pipeline (1730 km) from Baku to Ceyhan, on the Turkish Mediterranean coast, as well as an agreement with the Russian Federation for the exploitation of two crude oil fields in the Caspian.