Azerbaijan has chipped in a million dollars to the United Nations' Ebola response effort in what appears to be the latest installment in the ongoing campaign to promote Baku’s credentials as a responsible member of the international community.
As this donation underlines, the time when Azerbaijan was a war-ravaged, post-Soviet country relying on foreign aid is long gone. In recent years, whether schools for Georgia or restoration jobs for France, it has been steadily building up its donor activities.Oil and gas wealth helped changed everything, from the skyline of the capital, Baku, to the country’s military supplies and economic credentials abroad.
But one thing that has not changed, critics claim, are the Soviet, totalitarian ways, and, according to a growing choir of human-rights watchdogs, it is getting worse.
Critics of President Ilham Aliyev's government — at least those who remain at large— believe that Azerbaijan’s handouts for international development and charity serve primarily to blanket over international criticism of its dismal democracy record.
The government, of course, even as it hires one American PR guru, Liz Mair, to make its case in Washington, rejects the notion that it has any such need.