Azerbaijan has been under a close watch since yesterday’s morning. 6,000 observers – both local and overseas – monitored the elections in the republic, according to the country’s central election commission. 16 observers from Ukraine, including the director of the International Institute of Democracies Sergey Taran and the Pora party’s political council member Evgeny Zolotarev, were not allowed to join their colleagues. The envoys from the country of the victorious “orange revolution” were detained at the Baku airport yesterday to be called personae non gratae and sent back to their country. Baku said that their visit was interference in Azerbaijan’s internal affairs.

Information about violations at the elections appeared in the morning. This time around, Azerbaijan used the indelible ink to spray on voter’s fingers. Yet, the procedure did not hamper multiple voting, as observers found out. The ink was not checked at some polls because of failures of reading appliances. Ali Kerimli, the leader of the opposition movement People’s Front of Azerbaijan, told Kommersant correspondent that employees at some polling stations intentionally sprayed the ink on wrong fingers so that “checked” people could vote again. Ultimately, independent observers say that the “indelible” ink was often removed by vinegar. Other wide-spread fraud that the opposition complained about was “carousels” (when specially trained voters were bused to polling stations) and addition of extra ballots.

Kommersant correspondent visited a polling station of the 2nd Azizbekovksy district where the country’s first lady Mekhriban Alieva was in the running. Some 90 people had voted there by 12:00 a.m., local time, according to documents. But there were evidently more sheets in the transparent ballot-boxes – at least 450 ballots, as observers of the OSCE calculated. As Baba Rzaev, an independent observer said summing up the results of exit polls, 90 percent voters of the district had cast their ballots for the president’s wife by 12:00 a.m.

Ballot-boxes were allegedly taken out at five stations of the 27th Sabunchinsky district in the evening to be replaced with new, full with other voting papers, observers state. A bizarre thing happened at the 42 pollsof the 124th Shusha-Fizuli-Khodzhavend-Khodzhalinsky electoral district (where refugees vote). Gadir Sadygov, the secretary of the electoral commission from Eni, the Azerbaijan ruling party, stole the ballot box and absconded with it.

“We have processed the information on 5,947 violations. Their specific character and the nation-wide scale enable us to say that the fraud was prepared and managed from one center,” Panakh Guseynov, the head of the election headquarters of the Azadlyg, or Freedom, opposition bloc, reported. The head of the political research sector of the social and political issues department of the Azeri presidential administration Fuad Akhunkod responded to the accusations in the following way: “The opposition is painstakingly copying revolution technologies which are prepared abroad and designed for CIS countries. They will accuse the authorities of falsifications in order to lead the people to rallies.”

Observers from CIS were of the same view. “Everything is going well. No violations have been recorded,” Sergey Markov, an observer of the CIS Executive Committee’s International Monitoring Bureau, said. It was evidently a slip of the tongue but he said that “there was a serious chaos at all the polling stations we visited. He also mentioned that “people, especially women, were flatly against the finger marking, though they were eager to vote.”

How serious the accusations of opposition supporters are – we will probably learn it today. Leaders of the Azadlyg bloc promised they would not stage rallies before the official results were declared. Yet, they said yesterday that the elections were undemocratic, violations were large-scale and the opposition would start rallying on October 8 to revoke the results of the voting. Sardar Dzhalaloglu, a leader of Azadlyg, told Kommersant that the opposition was going to gather all the information on falsifications they had and “hand them to an international court, embassies and international organizations so that everybody, the whole world would urge the authorities to comply with the rules of the game that they change all the time.”


OBSERVERS

Yesterday’s elections were a test for the Azeri authorities. Many experts underscored that the way the elections would be held was no less important than how they would finish. The U.S. authorities repeated they would pronounce the elections valid only if the official results and data of exit polls vary within 2 percent. Washington also demanded that the election campaign be open and democratic.

A few private organizations, U.S. PA Government Service and Mitofsky International, and Estonian Saar Poll, were having their alternative calculations of votes. Washington is most likely to rely on the results of the former in its estimates of the fairness of the elections.

Neither of the sociological agencies held exit polls in all districts, but only in those chosen by a lot. It is noteworthy that PA Government Service did not examine the districts where leaders of the Azadlyg opposition bloc, Ali Kerimli, Isa Gambar and Rasul Guliev, were running for parliament. Many analysts perceived it as a kind of agreement between the Azeri and U.S. authorities – as if Washington gave the go-ahead to the non-passage of the most inflamed opposition leaders.

On top of it, observers in Baku note that the U.S. Ambassador to Azerbaijan Rino Harnish had lately done everything he could to keep back the opposition. For example, the American convinced its leaders on October 1 not to hold an unauthorized rally in central Baku and asked officials not to use force to participants of the action. There is more to it, the U.S. present sent his Azerbaijani counterpart a letter before the elections, which can be considered as support for the incumbent authorities. Finally, U.S. Deputy Secretary of State Dan Fried visited the Baku on the eve of the voting.

Moscow stands the same grounds, which, for one, is proved by yesterday’s statements of Russian observers from the CIS mission. Sergey Prikhodko, an advisor to the Russian president, said in a recent interview with Kommersant that Moscow backs the Azeri authorities since “the president of the friendly Azerbaijan is our partner; the policy Ilkham Aliev pursues is understandable and predictable.” On another note, the head of the Russian intelligence service Sergey Lebedev was staying in Baku the days while U.S. Deputy Secretary of State was there too.

So, the Azeri opposition had practically no serious backing. The country’s authorities could get problems only creating them by themselves – in case had undertaken out-and-out falsifications.

The U.S. Ambassador said yesterday that it would be wrong to make early conclusions on how election went. Rino Harnish stated that views on the elections in Azerbaijan must fully rely on the results of the monitoring on the voting day.


IN THE WAITING

Azeri President Ilkham Aliev made his latest address to the people a few days before the elections. But it sounded more like words of the winner after the voting. It seems that the parliamentary elections will become a mere episode in the struggle over power, the first lap of which the president has already won. The National Security Ministry uncovered a coup d’etat conspiracy two weeks before the elections, as Kommersant earlier reported. The opposition leader Rasul Guliev and a number of the most unpopular minister were accused. As a result, Rasul Guliev, who lives in exile but promised to return for the elections, stayed in London, while the ministers-conspirators were arrested. The footage of their examinations was aired on the Azeri television last week – you can’t think of any better advertisement for the president. Ilkham Aliev’s approval rating immediately soared following intense activities against corrupted officials of his own entourage (to be more exact, those he inherited with the power from his father, the late Geydar Aliev).

The purge in the high ranks of Azeri officials is mostly likely to continue after the elections. Late last week, President Aliev gave a speech to ministers telling them off before TV cameras. “I would like to repeat once again: those who want to go into politics, who want to embark on this way, please stand up right now and declare it. The door is always open,” the president stormed. This means that new resignation among the “old guards” may ensue. What is more, the president may even benefit from the accusations of rigging the elections – since he will be able to shift these faults to another group of disloyal ministers.