By Liz Fuller
 

The death of former Azerbaijani President Heidar Aliyev was announced on 12 December. Aliyev was 80 and had been hospitalized since early July, first in Ankara and then in Ohio's Cleveland Clinic. Aliyev became president of the Azerbaijan Republic since October 1993, and he presided over the signing of landmark deals to exploit Azerbaijan's Caspian oil reserves and to build a pipeline to export that oil to Turkey. On 17 April, he finally affirmed that Azerbaijan had decided on and will continue to pursue a low-key policy aimed at meeting the requirements for eventual NATO membership.

According to his official biography, Aliyev was born into a blue-collar family in the Nakhichevan Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic on 10 May 1923. But the opposition newspaper "Hurriyet" claimed in early July that Aliyev was in fact born four years earlier, in March 1919, and that he falsified his date of birth to avoid conscription during World War II. The paper further alleged that in the 1970s Aliyev fired then-Prosecutor-General Gambai Mamedov for making that information public.

Upon graduating in 1939 from the Nakhichevan Pedagogical Institute (that date suggests that the 1919 date of birth is more plausible than 1923), Aliyev entered the People's Commissariat of Internal Affairs, where he must have swiftly made a favorable impression on his superiors: he transferred to Moscow to a staff assignment with the USSR Council of People's Commissars (the forerunner of the USSR Council of Ministers), joining the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU) in 1945.

Again according to his official biography, in 1950 he returned to Baku and transferred to the republican Ministry for State Security (later the KGB), working his way up through the ranks to become republican KGB deputy chairman in 1964 and chairman in 1967. But according to sociologist Ilya Zemtsov, who worked closely with Aliyev in Baku in the 1970s, in 1953 Aliyev was assigned to the Eastern Department of the KGB and traveled extensively in the Near and Middle East. In the late 1950s, according to Zemtsov, Aliyev graduated from the KGB Higher School and was promoted to the rank of colonel. Only after that was he sent back to Azerbaijan.

In 1969, Aliyev's immediate superior, USSR KGB Chairman Semen Tsvigun, recommended him to CPSU Central Committee General Secretary Leonid Brezhnev, who was married to Tsvigun's sister. Brezhnev agreed that Aliyev should replace the notoriously corrupt and inefficient Azerbaijan Communist Party First Secretary Veli Akhundov. For the next 13 years, Aliyev lavished flattery (and diamonds) on the ailing Brezhnev, who swallowed his claims to have galvanized the republic's moribund economy, doubled agricultural output, and eradicated the corruption for which Azerbaijan had become a byword. It was on the strength of that reputation as a capable and energetic economic manager that former KGB Chairman Yurii Andropov brought Aliyev to Moscow in November 1982 to serve as a first deputy chairman of the USSR Council of Ministers.

But in 1987, Aliyev fell foul of Mikhail Gorbachev, who had succeeded Konstantin Chernenko as CPSU general secretary in March 1985. At a Central Committee plenum in November 1987, Aliyev was dismissed "on health grounds" and expelled from the Politburo. Aliyev lived quietly for several years in Moscow, but in 1990 he demonstratively quit the Communist Party to protest the arbitrary killings of Azerbaijanis in Baku by Soviet troops dispatched by Gorbachev. In 1991, Aliyev returned to his native Nakhichevan, and in September 1991 he was elected chairman of the republican Supreme Soviet.

When rebel Colonel Suret Guseinov launched his insurrection against the regime of Azerbaijan Popular Front Chairman Abulfaz Elchibey in early June 1993, Elchibey summoned Aliyev from Nakhichevan and engineered his election as parliament speaker. Days later, Elchibey fled Baku, whereupon Aliyev co-opted Huseinov, offering him the post of prime minister. Aliyev's position as head of state was formalized in a presidential ballot in October 1993, in which he defeated two political unknowns. Huseinov escaped to Moscow one year later following the collapse of what was said to be an attempt to oust Aliyev.

Aliyev was re-elected president in 1998 in a ballot marred by egregious falsification, and he planned to run for a third term in 2003, but was prevented from doing so by his failing health. In August, when already hospitalized, he appointed his son, Ilham, as prime minister, thus paving the way for the latter's successful election as president in October.

As president of Azerbaijan, Aliev presided over a clan-based elite that carved up the spoils of privatization and oil, while the vast majority of the population lived in poverty. The Yeni Azerbaycan Party he created to serve as his formal power base dominates the parliament, in which opposition parties occupy only a handful of the 125 seats. Despite his professed commitment to democratization, he failed to promote political pluralism, playing cat-and-mouse with opposition parties and with the independent media. Foreign investors have sunk millions of dollars into developing the oil-and-gas sector, some with spectacular success, while several consortiums have been dissolved after trial drilling failed to find oil in commercially viable quantities. But other sectors of the economy, including agriculture, are stagnating, and infrastructure across the country has fallen into decay and unemployment has skyrocketed.

Nor did Aliyev succeed in resolving the Karabakh conflict, or in winning back any of the 15 percent of Azerbaijani territory that was controlled by Armenian forces when he was first elected president. But having brought Azerbaijan back into the CIS in 1993, he succeeded in crafting and implementing a foreign policy that balanced the conflicting and shifting interests of Iran, Turkey, Russia and the United States. Azerbaijan was a founding member of the GUAM alignment in 1997, and offered to host a U.S. or NATO military base even before the terrorist attacks of 11 September 2001 in the United States.

But at the same time, Aliyev presided over a rapprochement with Russia. The more than 100 strong Russian delegation that traveled to Baku to attend his funeral was led by President Vladimir Putin, who said of the deceased: "Not only did I think of him with a lot of respect -- I loved him. For me personally, and for relations between our countries, it certainly is a big loss."

As for the loss to his country, the Internet publication zerkalo.az observed on 13 December that it is impossible to underestimate the impact of the news of his death on generations of Azerbaijanis for whom he epitomized everything positive Azerbaijan has achieved during their lifetime. Britain's "Daily Telegraph" on 16 December quoted an elderly mourner on the streets of Baku as saying, "I don't believe such a person will ever be born again."