!âJĞ="justify">I spent last week in Azerbaijan and was surprised by what I saw. Baku in particular looks like one vast construction site these days. The elegant and chic late 19th century buildings in the city's heart that reflect its colorful past are being rapidly renovated. I was, however, disturbed by the number of what I call beton boxes, ugly modern-style concrete apartment blocks, that have sprung up everywhere and are destroying Baku's beautiful and unique skyline.

  After seeing a newly built apartment building on nearly every corner, I felt compelled to ask my friends whether these flats are indeed selling. I had been told that such flats were going for prices in excess of $4,000 per square meter. With a wry smile on his lips, one of them replied, “Azerbaijan is a capitalist country now. If they were not selling, why would our businessmen be investing in them?” I am sure that Stalin and his communist comrades-in-arms are turning in their graves these days…

 

The mass grave in Quba

  I started to wonder whether the countryside, or inner parts of Azerbaijan, are also benefiting from this apparent economic revival in the capital. My trip to Quba, a beautiful city in the northern part of the country, just 50 kilometers from the Russian (Dagestani) border, gave me the opportunity to make a first-hand comparison. Indeed, it seemed so. In Quba, for instance, I observed that the locals are enjoying tangible improvements in their quality of life. There is a high volume of border trade going on with Russia and a new road is being rapidly built from Quba to Baku, which I was told will extend as far as the Iranian border.

  While I was in Quba, city authorities showed me a mass grave that they have just discovered. It is peculiar in the sense that both Muslim and Jewish victims massacred by the Armenian Dashnaks in 1918 are buried there side-by-side. I took several photos that I will soon send specifically to Abraham Foxman, national director of the New York-based Anti-Defamation League (ADL) who, a couple of months ago, said that the World War I-era killings of Armenians by Turks “were tantamount to genocide.”

  The Azeri academics I spoke to voiced strong support for the idea. In fact, parliamentary resolutions in Western countries regarding the Armenian “genocide” allegations get their hackles as much as ours. I attended a lecture at Khazar University where almost every participant complained about “Western bias, ignorance and double-standards.” They could not understand how easily, or without having any idea about what really happened, they could arrive at such conclusions. I later found out that the government will soon initiate a campaign against Armenian propaganda. Atakhan Pashayev, head of Azerbaijan's national archives, for instance, told me that they, too, will soon open their archives and display the documents of this period on the Internet.

  Actually not a day passes in Azerbaijan without one hearing a discussion among the public relating their views on Armenia, Armenian-occupied territories, or Western countries' biased attitude towards the Nagorno-Karabakh dispute. Among the ordinary Azeris, the gackins (approximately one million refugees from Armenian-occupied lands) in particular, the belief that use of force seems to be inevitable has become more widespread than ever. The Azeri government has launched new programs to improve living conditions among the gackins. For instance, from the country's oil revenue, which witnessed a boom last year, AZN 154 million was allocated to refugees and internally displayed persons. Yet, as a school teacher in a refugee camp just outside Baku, where three to five families are forced to live together in a single room of only 15 square meters, told me, they would rather live in tents in their native land than in palaces in Baku.

 

Armenia's presidential elections

  That being said, what I was particularly interested in was how the Azeri decision-makers were approaching the presidential elections in Armenia, which are scheduled for Feb. 19. I spoke with several young Azeri MPs and found them to be brilliant minds with a strong vision of where the world, as well as their region, is headed. In particular, I wanted to know what they thought about the likelihood of Levon Ter-Petrossian being elected. They described Ter-Petrossian as a leader they could indeed work with, but expressed doubt about the possibility of him getting elected.

  I posed the same question to a senior authority and the answer I got was interesting. Noting that Azerbaijan's 2007 budget was approximately $12 billion, he told me that $1.2 billion of this amount was spent on the military. Actually, they would prefer to direct that money towards solutions to the problems Azeri people are facing today. “And Petrossian,” he then added, “is indeed someone to work with and a realistic politician who is aware of the potential that the region holds.” However, he too was pessimistic that the elections would be fair and free. He doesn't believe, he said, Armenia's “Karabakh clan” in power wants a normalization of relations with either Azerbaijan or Turkey.

  Towards the end of my trip, I came together with a group of journalists. In the interviews, the first question they posed to me was why Turkish reactions to Hrant Dink's murder had been so exaggerated, citing the public slogan “We all are Armenian.” This clearly had confused and hurt them. I tried to explain that the way Hrant Dink was murdered certainly needed to be condemned, and that the people chanting such slogans were trying to show solidarity and empathy with the Armenian Turkish community. One of them reproachfully replied, “Our territories have been under Armenian occupation for the last 15 years. Why do Turkish journalists in particular begrudge us the same empathy they showed the Armenians?”

  This was a question for which I had no answer.. .