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.