Big Oil Comes Back To Baku

Natural History, March, 1999 by Mark Jacobson

Things are even bleaker in Saatli, where refugees live in a mile-long line of railway cars. In summer, temperatures in the metal carriages can reach 125 degrees. Smoke from burning dung used as fuel in winter has caused serious outbreaks of asthma. Taped to one railway car wall, alongside torn Bruce Lee posters, is a handwritten list of towns in Nagorno-Karabakh and the dates on which they were taken by Armenian forces. "Death is our only way back now," declares one man. Whenever anyone dies, he says, their body is driven as close to their former home as can be done without the drivers being shot, and there it is buried.

At a tent camp near windswept Barda, where four thousand people have been quartered for three years, patience has all but run out. Here, when aid workers arrive, there are no welcoming glasses of tea, no handshakes. Why hasn't the doctor been to the camp? people yell. Why haven't materials been provided to fix torn tents? In the crowd is a man who gives his name as Ilyas. To say that Ilyas--who is in his early thirties and has dark pinpoint eyes--exudes anger would be to miss the point. Kafkaesque disbelief is more like it. Before the war, Ilyas taught chemistry in high school. He was married, with two young children. When the Armenians started bombing his town, Agdam, Ilyas sent his family to Baku. He never heard from them again. Escaping the war zone, he searched in vain for a year; now he believes his wife left him for another man. Without home or money, he wound up in the tent camp. He says, "For me to end up in such a place--it is something difficult to accept."

As a teacher, Ilyas often discussed Azerbaijan's oil industry in his classes. The "science of petroleum" was an important part of the nation's history, he says. His own grandfather was an oil worker back in Soviet times. Listening to the radio in his tent, he's heard about the fifth Caspian Sea Oil and Gas Exhibition currently underway in Baku, which he describes as a gathering of "rich foreigners eating in restaurants." Considering his situation and that of the other refugees, Ilyas feels only despair. "In the old oil boom, when Azeris became rich, they helped other Azeris," he points out. Many of those first oil barons, cognizant that oil was "the property of God," spent much of their fortunes for the greater good of the society. But what about now? "You are American," Ilyas says. "Many of these oil companies here now are American. Americans have never helped Azerbaijan. We have lost all trust in the Americans. What might they do for us now?"

This seems a reasonable question, one worth pondering a few nights later at the American Embassy in Baku. Located in one of the nineteenth-century oil boom's most elegant buildings, the embassy is hosting a garden party in honor of delegates to the oil show.' The keynote speaker at the party is the U.S. Commerce Department Under Secretary of International Trade, David Aaron. That Azerbaijan is a country of "singular strategic and economic importance ... a good place to do business" is the message he will bring President Clinton, Aaron tells the assembled oilies. And things will be even better once 907 becomes history, the Under Secretary announces.