The International Herald Tribune, France
February 9, 2013 Saturday
In Azerbaijan, the sky’s the limit: Lavish project includes 55
artificial islands and world’s tallest building
by PETER SAVODNIK
Fueled by oil revenue, Azerbaijan has big ambitions — including plans
for the world’s tallest building.
Ibrahim Ibrahimov was on the three-hour Azerbaijan Airlines flight
from Dubai to Baku when he had a vision. ”I wanted to build a city,
but I didn’t know how,” he recalled. ”I closed my eyes and I began
to imagine this project.”
Mr. Ibrahimov, 54, is one of the richest men in Azerbaijan. In the
middle of his reverie, he summoned the flight attendant. ”I asked for
some paper, but there wasn’t any. So I grabbed this shirt in my bag
that I hadn’t tried on. I took the tissue paper out and in 20 minutes
I drew the whole thing.”
Once he arrived in Baku, Mr. Ibrahimov went straight to his architects
and said, ”Draw this exactly the way I did.” Avesta Concern, the
company that governs his various business interests, subsequently
commissioned the blueprints for Mr. Ibrahimov’s vision. The result is
to be a sprawling development called Khazar Islands, an archipelago of
55 artificial islands in the Caspian Sea with thousands of apartments,
at least eight hotels, a Formula One racetrack, a yacht club, an
airport and the tallest building on earth, Azerbaijan Tower, which is
to rise 1,050 meters, or 3,445 feet.
When the whole project is complete, according to Avesta, 800,000
people will live at Khazar Islands, and there will be hotel rooms for
an additional 200,000, totaling nearly half the population of Baku. It
will cost about $100 billion, which is more than the gross domestic
product of most countries, including Azerbaijan.
”It will cost $3 billion just to build Azerbaijan Tower,” Mr.
Ibrahimov said. ”Some people may object. I don’t care. I will build
it alone. I work with my feelings.”
It is not surprising that Mr. Ibrahimov had his epiphany on a flight
from Dubai. The fake islands and the glass and steel towers – many of
which resemble the sail-shaped Burj Al Arab hotel in Dubai – are
emblems of the modern Gulf petro-dictatorship. And two decades after
the collapse of the Soviet Union, Azerbaijan could be accused of
having similar ambitions. The country has 9.2 million people and is
cut off from any oceans. It builds nothing that the rest of the world
wants, and it has no internationally recognized universities. It does,
however, have oil.
In 2006, Azerbaijan started pumping crude from its oil field under the
Caspian Sea through the new Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan pipeline. Now, with
the help of BP and other foreign energy companies, one million barrels
of oil course through the pipeline daily, ending up at a Turkish port
on the northeast corner of the Mediterranean Sea. This makes
Azerbaijan a legitimate energy power with a great deal of potential.
If the proposed Nabucco pipeline, running from Turkey to Austria, is
built, Azerbaijan will become a conduit for gas reserves, linking
Central Asia to Europe. This could strip Russia, which sells the
European Union more than a third of the gas it consumes, of one of its
most potent foreign policy levers. It could also generate billions of
dollars a year for Azerbaijan.
Sitting on a couch in his temporary headquarters at the construction
site of his future city, Mr. Ibrahimov mulled over the possibilities.
Mr. Ibrahimov said he had slept five hours but was not tired. He
started the day with an hourlong run, followed by a dip in the Caspian
Sea, followed by a burst of phone calls, followed by meetings with
some people from the Foreign Ministry, then the Turks, then his
engineers and architects. Now, while sipping tea, his attention was
back on Khazar Islands, which he insisted was not modeled after Dubai.
”Dubai is a desert,” he said. ”The Arabs built an illusion of a
country. The Palm” – a faux-island development in Dubai – ”is not
right. The water smells. Also, they built very deep in the sea. That’s
dangerous. The Palm is beautiful to look at, but it’s not good to live
in.”
Few countries have come as far in mastering the art of geopolitics as
Azerbaijan. After being occupied by Cyrus the Great, Alexander the
Great, the Seljuks, the Mongols, the Persians, the Russians, the
Ottomans and, finally, the Soviets, Azerbaijan, which achieved its
independence in 1991, has cultivated relationships with the United
States and many European countries and deepened relations with Russia
and key Central Asian ”stans.”
In the old days, they came for Azerbaijan’s location. About a century
ago, they started coming for oil. Then, after the Soviet Union
collapsed, the energy sector became a source of enormous wealth. Now
Azerbaijan is trying to take advantage of that wealth. Avesta’s sales
and marketing team recently produced a gleaming 101-page coffee-table
book promoting Khazar Islands. There is also a video that shows
computer renderings of Khazar Islands in the not-too-distant future.
When I arrived in Baku, the first of the Khazar Islands had already
been plunked down, and the first few apartment buildings were going
up. Boulevards and traffic circles had been paved, and everywhere
there seemed to be retaining walls and the concrete outlines of future
cineplexes.
Last spring, on the day before I left for Baku from Moscow, 96
apartments had been sold. Two days later, that figure inched up to
102. Now, it is 136. The asking prices run from about $280 to $460 per
square foot, meaning a typical 1,076-square-foot, or 100-square-meter,
apartment at Khazar Islands starts around $300,000. Mr. Ibrahimov said
he expected geometric growth after 2015, when workers are scheduled to
break ground on Azerbaijan Tower.
Western financial analysts and real estate developers are
understandably skeptical. For one thing, there is President Ilham
Aliyev’s regime, which opposes political competition and changes that
would diversify Azerbaijan’s economy and encourage the long-term
growth needed for this kind of mega-project. There is the fact that no
one has ever tried anything this ambitious in Azerbaijan. Finally,
this is a rough neighborhood. The conflict in Nagorno- Karabakh, an
autonomous region within the country, raged between Azerbaijan and
Armenia from 1988 to 1994 and has never really been resolved. And
there is the chance of a U.S. or Israeli strike on Iran, Azerbaijan’s
southern neighbor.
Yet Mr. Ibrahimov, sitting behind the blueprints in his log cabin,
remained extremely optimistic. Azerbaijan, with its new money and
undeveloped coastline, offers businessmen from the former Soviet Union
an affordable nearby playground.
It was crucial, Mr. Ibrahimov told me, to visualize what everything
would look like in 2022, when Khazar Islands is supposed to be
finished. He pointed outside a small window, to the sea. ”That is
where it will be,” he said, referring to Azerbaijan Tower. ”In the
water. Can you see it?”
Some in Baku already can. Indeed, the most crucial factor underpinning
the project is that Mr. Aliyev’s regime seems to want Khazar Islands
built. Ilgar Mammadov, chairman of the pro-democracy Republicanist
Alternative Movement, characterized Khazar Islands as an inexorable
beast. The country’s international strategic monetary reserves are now
more than $46 billion, Mr. Mammadov said, and in 10 years, as oil and
gas revenue rises, they could be near $150 billion. ”Azerbaijan has
the capacity to build the tallest building,” he said. ”That’s not in
doubt. We will create this big building, and then it will, by itself,
by the very mere fact of its existence, bring cash. How will that
work? Nobody knows.”
Mr. Ibrahimov was sitting in the back seat of a black Rolls-Royce as
it tore across Island No.1 of his soon-to-be built archipelago. Nigar
Huseynli, his 23-year-old assistant, was sitting up front. As the
Rolls sped past knots of men in hard hats, Mr. Ibrahimov juggled
cellphones. His son called. Then the Qatari ambassador. Then someone
who annoyed him. Every time I started to ask a question or he started
to answer, there was a call or a text message.
Mr. Ibrahimov was born in a village in the Nakhichevan Autonomous
Republic, a sliver of Azerbaijan wedged between Armenia and Iran. He
called his father a ”good Soviet” and a major influence in his life,
but some suspect that Heydar Aliyev, Azerbaijan’s previous president,
played a more important role.
Mr. Aliyev, a former Politburo member, also came from Nakhichevan. In
1991, he became de facto leader of the autonomous republic, just as
the Soviet Union was falling apart and Mr. Ibrahimov was starting his
first business, a limited-liability corporation called Ilkan. It is
unclear what Ilkan made or sold, but in the early ’90s, according to
Avesta company literature, Mr. Ibrahimov built a three-story
headquarters for Ilkan in Nakhichevan, which would probably have been
very hard without support from someone powerful. Then, in 1993, Mr.
Aliyev became president of Azerbaijan, and in 1996, Mr. Ibrahimov
began Avesta.
Opposition figures say that Mr. Ibrahimov owes much of what he has to
the Aliyev family, but when I asked Mr. Ibrahimov about this, he
shrugged. He said Avesta was not only a corporation but also a
philanthropy, building water pipelines and mosques for poor villagers.
He called Heydar Aliyev, who died in 2003, his inspiration, and he
made a point of saying that he liked Mr. Aliyev’s son, the current
president, very muchand thought that he was guiding his country toward
a more glorious future.
On some level, there is an economic logic behind building the tallest
building anywhere. The rise of superdevelopments in cities like
Shanghai and Dubai sent signals to investors that the state supported
growth. Usually, these sorts of developments first attract the
attention of regional investors who know the local topography, which
Khazar Islands has already done. Next are the more skeptical
international investors whom Mr. Ibrahimov is hoping to impress. Hence
the Azerbaijan Tower.
Mr. Ibrahimov is not the only developer in Baku, and Khazar Islands is
not the only major development. Flame Towers, which features three
flamelike towers, includes a five-star hotel and at night will be
lighted in red. The Heydar Aliyev Center, designed by Zaha Hadid,
includes a museum and looks a little like the starship Enterprise.
Nearly three years after Mr. Ibrahimov’s vision on the Azerbaijan
Airlines flight, Khazar Islands has grown to four islands, one bridge
and 13 apartment buildings. All this development can feel a bit weird,
or at least incongruous. As the Rolls careered through the outskirts
of Baku, Mr. Ibrahimov became quiet. Unlike the United Arab Emirates,
which was, until recently, a desert, Baku has a rich architectural
history. I interpreted Mr. Ibrahimov’s silence as a sign of
melancholy, but in the front seat, Ms. Huseynli turned around
excitedly. Glancing at the beige facades and narrow streets, she said:
”All of this soon will be gone. Then we will have a new city. I like
the old, of course, the historic. … But this will be gone, and then
it will be a different country.”
When we pulled up to the Avesta Concern Tower, in central Baku,
several men were assembled on the curb and ready to escort us inside.
After lunch in Mr. Ibrahimov’s private dining room, we decamped to the
office. He pointed out his artifacts: his desk, which, he said, is
Spanish and the same kind used by President Vladimir V. Putin of
Russia; a chess set from Italy; a sculpture of his father.
He segued back to Ilham Aliyev, whom he called a great supporter. I
asked him about other features of his regime: the lack of
transparency, the lack of civil liberties. Mr. Ibrahimov said what
oligarchs have been saying since Mikhail B. Khodorkovsky, the Russian
industrialist, was exiled to Siberia in 2003: ”I don’t know anything
about politics.” But businessmen are much more intimately woven into
the political fabric of Russia or Azerbaijan than chief executives in
the West. They may wear crocodile-skin shoes, but they rely on the
state for extraction rights.
Mr. Ibrahimov knows his place, and he knows it is best to be
philosophical about these things. ”Don’t ask me about politics,” he
said. ”I’m afraid I’ll make a mistake. This is not what I’m good
at.” Then he started talking about his next big idea, which features
more stratospheric buildings and eight-star hotel-palaces and
heliports. He was sure all these things could be done. He knew it.
There were important people – ”political people,” he said – who
support him.
From: Emil Lazarian | Ararat NewsPress
