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From Baku, With Love (And Intolerance)

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  • From Baku, With Love (And Intolerance)

    Slate Magazine
    May 25, 2012 Friday 10:15 AM GMT


    >From Baku, With Love (And Intolerance)

    This year's Eurovision is in Azerbaijan. Can the conservative country
    be a good host for Europe's wildest party?

    by Joshua Kucera

    Can Azerbaijan Be a Good Host for Europe's Wildest Party?


    Baku, the petrocapital on the shore of the Caspian Sea, has been
    designed under the principle that too much is never enough. Its newest
    monument is the Flame Towers, a set of three flame-shaped buildings on
    a hill overlooking the entire city, with LED lights that at night
    alternate between animations of a flickering fire and a figure waving
    an Azerbaijani flag. Close by is a TV tower bathed in iridescent
    purple light. Below that is what was, for a short time, the world's
    largest flagpole. Baku is kitschy, brash, and over the top.

    In other words, it's the perfect place to host the Eurovision Song Contest.

    For non-Europeans who might not be familiar with Eurovision: it's
    American Idol crossed with the Olympics, in which all the countries of
    Europe compete to determine who has the best song of the year. Each
    year's winner (chosen by the European public) gets to host the
    following year's contest, and the victory of Ell and Nikki last year
    ensured that Baku would get this year's honors. The finals are
    Saturday evening; an estimated 125 million people across Europe (it's
    the largest non-sports TV event in the world) are expected to watch
    favorites Sweden, Russia, and Italy duke it out.

    Azerbaijan's government, relishing its moment in this spotlight, has
    gone all-out in getting ready for Eurovision. It's built a brand-new
    performance hall, imported 1,000 purple London-style taxis, and lit up
    its handsome 19th-century downtown. It wasn't always clear, though,
    that Azerbaijan would be a natural host for Eurovision. Eurovision is
    no stranger to politicization, but Azerbaijan's hosting has been
    especially fraught. The issues were probably best put by one of my
    colleagues, Giorgi Lomsadze: "the contest will bring along
    demographics that are not particularly popular in Baku-journalists,
    Armenians and gays."
    Eurovision has a huge gay following; a piece in Pink News ("Europe's
    Largest Gay News Service") called it "the gay World Cup." Azerbaijan
    is a culturally conservative country, where gays have to keep their
    orientation well-hidden, which caused many to wonder if gay Eurovision
    fans would in fact feel comfortable in Baku. As Pink News put it,
    "Azerbaijan could be far from welcoming and many fans may decide not
    to go. People at a high level are worried about this." Azerbaijan
    government officials, though, have publicly stated that gays are
    welcome in Baku, and there is no indication that gays stayed away
    because of Azerbaijan's reputation.

    The problem with Armenians was settled a bit more easily. Armenia and
    Azerbaijan are still in a state of war over Armenia's occupation of
    Azerbaijan's territory of Nagorno Karabakh. Armenians are now widely,
    and virulently, hated in Azerbaijan, and Azerbaijan has been spending
    billions on its military for what appears to be an inevitable war to
    take back Karabakh from the Armenians. So there was the potential for
    some awkardness if Armenia's Eurovision competitors and fans came to
    Baku. But this crisis was averted by the Armenians themselves who,
    bowing to pressure from their own nationalists, dropped out of the
    contest. Prospects for better relations through song were dim, anyway:
    In 2009, Azerbaijani police actually called in for questioning locals
    who dared vote for Armenia's Eurovision entry, tracing the votes to
    their cell phone. (Azercell, the mobile-phone company implicated in
    that incident, is an official Eurovision sponsor this year.)

    Perhaps most vexing of all, however, are the journalists. To say that
    Azerbaijan has a poor reputation internationally would be an
    understatement. Its treatment of its own citizens is frequently
    deplorable, and international and local human rights groups have used
    the occasion of Eurovision to draw attention to Azerbaijan's many
    shortcomings in the hopes that journalists visiting Baku to cover the
    song contest might also write about the grim political backdrop. At a
    hotel, I picked up what looked like a standard tourist map of Baku
    only to discover that it was a clever mockup by Human Rights Watch,
    featuring "sights" where local journalists and activists have been
    assaulted or killed. One local journalist, Khadija Ismailova, has done
    strong investigative reporting on how the Azerbaijani president's
    family has been profiting from Eurovision-related construction
    projects; for her troubles, she's been the target of a viciously
    personal smear campaign.

    On Monday, two top government spokesmen held a press conference for
    foreign reporters covering Eurovision, ostensibly to address those
    sorts of concerns. But it only served to reinforce the thuggish
    reputation of the government here. To relatively tame questions about
    Azerbaijan's human rights record, presidential spokesman Ali Hasanov
    offered improbable theories of anti-Azerbaijani propaganda
    conspiracies hatched by Germany and Armenia. (German NGOs and the
    German government have been especially active in criticizing
    Azerbaijan's human rights record; Baku, with characteristic subtlety,
    has in response invoked Hitler.) And the local press, far from holding
    him to account for these claims, only baited him further; one asked
    about "German neo-colonialism" and another about whether, as a result
    of anti-Eurovision propaganda, "we know who is our friend and who
    isn't our friend" and how that will affect Baku's foreign policy in
    the future.

    All this has caused some to question whether Baku is "European" enough
    to be an appropriate host of Eurovision. Azerbaijanis have long
    debated whether they belong in Europe or Asia: In the classic novel of
    the Caucasus, Ali and Nino, Baku's old city-where "the houses were
    narrow and curved like oriental daggers" and "minarets pierced the
    mild moon"- was Asia, while the new city, home to the oil companies of
    czarist Russia, was Europe. "It is partly your responsibility as to
    whether our town should belong to progressive Europe or to reactionary
    Asia," Ali's teacher says. One impudent classmate responds, "Please,
    sir, we would rather stay in Asia."

    Today, the government likes to use the line that it is a bridge
    between Europe and Asia, embodying both "European" values like
    tolerance and "Asian" ones like respect for elders. But with
    Eurovision coming to town, the government has tried to emphasize its
    European bona fides. "We are located at the crossroads of Asia and
    Europe. We could remain in Asia, but we have chosen the way of
    European development," Hasanov said at the press conference. In an
    earlier interview, he said of Eurovision fans: "Having seen with their
    own eyes the excellent culture of Azerbaijan, the hospitality of our
    people and our tolerance, they will of course see that the
    anti-Azerbaijan publications are deliberate provocations."

    So is Hasanov right, that the only people who think ill of the
    government are foreign journalists and human rights activists
    criticizing from afar? I took a bus tour of Baku offered to Eurovision
    fans, and found the tourists surprisingly well-versed on Azerbaijan's
    dirty secrets. And it seems that the government's attempt to manage
    Eurovision so tightly may have in fact backfired.

    Minutes into the tour, we passed a site where some old houses were
    being razed. Several of the tourists rushed to the side of the bus and
    snapped photos; it turns out they had all heard about how the
    government has illegally expropriated and torn down houses in the rush
    to modernize and beautify the city. They mockingly pointed out the
    ubiquitous billboards for Emin, the president's son-in-law who will
    perform at the Eurovision finals. (The president's wife is also the
    chairwoman of the event, suggesting an attempt to hijack the event for
    the personal glory of the first family.

    One of the fans was Birgit, a young Swiss woman wearing a T-shirt
    declaring her allegiance to Jedward, the boy-band duo that is
    Ireland's entry in the contest. When we got to the Flame Towers, she
    grumbled, "I heard they spent $5 million just for the lights-it's so
    stupid."

    I also met a group of five Spanish men, and asked them what they
    thought of Baku. "It's a very artificial city," said Pablo, the only
    English speaker of the group. "It's like you're in Eurodisney-it's
    very beautiful, but you know it's fake." He said that on the website
    of the Eurovision fan club they belong to there was extensive
    discussion of the land expropriation issue. "The people have no
    rights, it's terrible." He said he and other fans also were troubled
    by the first family's involvement in the contest. "The people here are
    very nice, but you get the idea that someone told them to be nice."

    This is what happens when you create a Potemkin village: Everything in
    it, even the real things, seem fake. With a per-capita income of $450
    a month, not many Azerbaijanis are participating in the country's
    wealth. Even casual visitors can see that, besides the fancy taxis,
    the streets are full of Ladas and decrepit buses; that just beyond the
    beautiful new buildings are crumbling apartment blocks that only have
    running water for a few hours a day. The Baku that the government is
    creating is a triumph of style over substance. Again, the perfect
    place for Eurovision.

    This reporting was made possible by a grant from the Pulitzer Center
    on Crisis Reporting.

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