Atop Azerbaijan's oil boom: Mr. Aliyev

Many international NGOs that study Azerbaijan appear to share such concerns. "Our authorities are absolutely corrupt, and we can expect nothing good from them," says Leila Yunes, director of the independent Institute for Peace and Democracy in Baku. "Any attempt to assert popular control over the state, through the political process or the media, is immediately crushed."

The New York-based Human Rights Watch says that "Azerbaijan's government has a long-standing record of pressuring opposition parties and civil society groups and limiting critical expression."

Transparency International, which monitors global corruption, places Azerbaijan 137th in a list of 159 countries, while the world media-rights watchdog Reporters Without Borders describes Azerbaijan's situation as "difficult." The Washington-based Freedom House, which rates political openness, this year demoted Azerbaijan from "partly free" to "not free."

But Aliyev questions the accuracy of such judgments.

"I treat these kind of ratings with a high degree of skepticism," says Aliyev. And, like many Azeri officials, he suggests that the negative views of their country originate with Azerbaijan's beleaguered but still highly vocal opposition, which was nearly wiped out in parliamentary polls a year ago, and then violently crushed by police when it tried to protest the election results in the streets of Baku. "We see a complete fiasco of those who pretend to call themselves the opposition in Azerbaijan," says Aliyev. "They've done nothing but criticize, while the government has done a lot. It's the end of their history."

Though international monitors were sharply critical of the 2005 elections, most Western governments, including the US, offered Aliyev only mild reproaches. Opposition leaders accuse them of selling out Azerbaijan's freedom for oil. "Why did the West support the (pro-democracy) revolutions in Ukraine and Georgia but they did not support us here, when we had the chance?" says Sardar Djalai-ogly, deputy chair of the opposition Democratic Party. "Now, we have no democracy at all here."

But that doesn't seem to have affected investor confidence. British Petroleum, which has managed most of Azerbaijan's oil and gas projects since the mid-1990s, gives Aliyev high marks for maintaining stability in a dangerous neighborhood. "BP has stayed here through very difficult times," says Rashid Javanshir, vice president of BP-Azerbaijan. "The desire of the government to make this work has been key to our decision to stay. Conditions are very favorable to foreign investors here."

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