Vultures' Picnic, page 8
For fun, the Party Blogger put on a donkey suit and held a press conference. President Baby Baba saw the YouTube video of the event and suspected he was the ass. He was. He is. Whatever, the partying donkey got two and half years in prison.
It didn’t help that the Party Blogger had blessed “the Father, the Son, and the Holy Pipeline.”
The donkey’s arrest was mentioned by the BBC World Service. Result: In 2009, BBC’s Azeri broadcast was banned from the radio dial. America’s Radio Liberty also broadcast the presidential ass and was booted off the air as well.
Murder-meat pulled his chair still closer to our translator and whispered to him in their lonely language. (Only the eight million residents of this oil kingdom speak Azeri.)
Even now, looking at the film from the pen, it chills me.
Green Party listened, turned white, mumbled, and nodded, then turned gray, aging in that instant. He looked as I imagined Jacob looked when he begged God and the angels not to let Esau beat him. “Will you stay my brother’s hand?”
No sense asking me; nothing I can do.
Murder-meat grinned. He turned to the officers, chuckled, they chuckled back—and he signaled them to return our passports and press credentials. We were told we could now interview Professor Green Party, on camera. As our background, we had the giant grinning head of President Baba on the billboard in front of a chemical plant. A fresh gaggle of cops “escorted” us.
We rolled film. I asked the dissident Green Party candidate about what happened to the millions of dollars BP paid to Baba’s oil company that no one can seem to find.
He responded, “Those who suggest there is corruption are only serving the purposes of Great Britain, the United States, and Israel!”
Israel??
Before my eyes, the brave Green Man was turning into an Islamic Republican ; he was channeling Baba. And he was speaking in Azeri, so our uniformed hosts could hear he was being a good little foal, a good little donkey.
As Murder-meat’s black sedan drove off, I could hear a couple of loose steel balls clinking in his pocket.
In fact, I had rehearsed this interview with Green Party the night before. That’s unusual, but I needed him to practice his English for the on-camera version. So I thought I already knew his answers. But now, while he spoke, I wrote in my notebook for James to see,He’s backing down on everything
and underlined and circled it.
What had I expected? As the Party Blogger explained,
“IN AZERBAIJAN, POSSIBILITIES FOR DONKEYS ARE ENORMOUS. IF YOU ARE DONKEY ENOUGH, YOU CAN SUCCEED IN PROBABLY ANYTHING.”
Advice straight from the ass’s mouth. Well, I too have munched a lot of hay in my life, even without being shown the implements of torture.
TERMINAL TOWN
Our official cover story for filming in Baku was this: We would make a documentary about the “booming economy” of the Islamic republic. That the only businesses booming are bribery and BP were details we left out of our application to the Ministry.
But still, we were more than willing to film the happy side of the oil boom. So we drove out to Sangachal, Terminal Town, where BP’s oil is stuffed into the pipe for more deserving people in Western Europe. I expected to film the Big Action, the usual oil boom-times berserker stuff; cash-rich oil workers spending like lunatics. Except we couldn’t find any of it.
We showed up in Terminal Town in the middle of the workday. Yet we saw only listless men milling around in chattering groups.
At random, with our translator, I grabbed a loud, big one, Elmar Mamonov. The tall, impressive man, a kind of Muslim Max von Sydow, was mildly wasted, probably on the local stuff that tastes like cough syrup and napalm, which gave him the temporary courage to say to me, on camera, “I will speak with you what has happened to us.”
Walking along Terminal Town’s main street with Mamonov was like doing the rounds in a cancer ward. “This one’s daughter has breast cancer there; Rasul had a brain tumor. Cancers we had never seen. His funeral was last week. Alev Salaam. Azlan here—hey, Azlan!—had lung cancer and he paid to have one of his lungs cut out.” And there was Shala Tageva, a schoolteacher, who has ovarian cancer. She needs treatment soon, but how, Mamonov can’t imagine. Shala is Mamonov’s wife.
Maybe that’s why they call it Terminal Town.
Suddenly, Mamonov stopped himself.
“If I am arrested, you will help me, yes?”
Actually, I can’t. But I leave out that detail. Am I going to be a complete shit and lie to him, or am I going to tell him the truth? If they bust you, you’re on your own.
If big boys like BBC World Service got kicked, Mr. Mamonov, you will be kicked harder by Baby Baba’s braying asses, right into some medieval hole. You will be forgotten, while my network sends a letter of apology to the regime for “accidentally” violating the conditions of our film permit.
I’m only half a shit. I told Mamonov, “We will do everything we can.” At least I deliberately misspelled his name.
I applaud his unwitting courage.
At three A.M. on moonless nights, the air in Terminal Town gets funky, nasty. In Houston, near the Exxon refinery, they call it Sky Dumping. Toxins that should be sealed and buried—an expensive process—are instead loaded into furnaces and sent up the “flaring” stacks and belched into the sky. Hard to discover, harder to trace.
BP is not trying to choke poor Muslims to death. As the CEO of Shell USA once told me, “Oil companies have no ideology.” BP has no religious prejudices. They Sky-Dump in Texas City too, and at their refinery on the Gulf, heavily Protestant; Exxon does it in Houston and in Cancer Alley, Louisiana, lots of Creole and Cajun Catholics.
I wandered around Terminal Town with James and his camera, pretending I can do something about all this. Now, if Mr. Azlan, the man who had a lung removed, were a seal or a snowy egret or a pelican covered in oil, I could get CNN and Anderson Cooper to come here in a flash. Or better, a whale: Then Azlan’s plight would have a shot at the National Geographic channel.
But Azlan is just some Muslim schmuck at the end of BP’s pipe. You could say he’s one of the lucky ones—one of the few who got a job with BP. “But it cost me my lung! And they wouldn’t pay to have it cut out! And then they fired me because I couldn’t work hard enough!” What did you expect when you rejected Soviet occupation for BP occupation? You’ve got a lung left; how many do you need?
And frankly, what can I do about it? Mr. Azlan is not a very cute mammal, and he’s not photogenically covered in crude. Here in Terminal Town, the oil residues enter their bodies and eat them alive from the inside out.
No one wants to see that.
I went into Mamonov’s backyard, where he introduced me to his one chicken. At least the chicken is living large: It’s got a huge coop all to itself. Mamonov told me he used to have twenty hens.
Out in the yard, keeping the chicken company, stood a piano, properly tuned. It is what remains from the Great Leap Backward. Elmar’s family had fallen from a great height, and like all those who fall, they cling fiercely to one or two objects of the lost life. A homeless man keeps a television remote control, refugees will leave food behind yet haul a candelabra and broken candles, a chessboard, crushed silver Sabbath cups (my family), or, for the Mamonovs, the piano. It couldn’t fit in their chicken coop of a house, but the classical instrument stayed with them, out in the desert air, kept for his daughter to play Azeri music of another time, the Shostakovich concerti often played by Rostropovich, a native son.
I remembered that a Rostropovich favorite was Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk. Lady Baba seems more comfortable with other tunes. I know that many consider her cruel, but at least Lady Baba did not force Elmar and his ill wife to attend the big Elton John concert. (Baby Baba spent millions on bringing the Liberace of the eighties to Baku.)
Mamonov’s daughter made an appearance, shy, in a modest head scarf. She is about fourteen, a year older than my own daughter (who quit piano lessons, just lost interest, but I still have the keyboard packed away somewhere). I asked the young Miss Mamonova if she could play “Crocodile Rock.” His daughter also helps in his shoe shop. Elmar recalled selling a pair two years ago.
One other set of objects remains with Elmar the cobbler after The Fall: the shoe “lasts,” the uppers without soles, nearly finished, and left so for a decade, fuzzed with dust. The workers of Terminal Town can no longer afford these work shoes because they have no work—nor need any for the same reason. If only Lady Baba would patronize his shop just once . . . but alas.
So the locals now wear sandals. Even Elmar, the shoemaker himself, wears cheap flip-flops as he falls backward with his nation into the fourteenth century. The tarmac on Terminal Town’s Main Street is crumpling to dust; it is now just a medieval dirt track. The only thing missing is a camel.
CARACAS
What happened in Azerbaijan?
In Caracas they went crackers; in Alaska, locals tumbled ass over heels; in Africa, Britain, Kansas, and Rio, where Cariocas went cuckoo, everyone goes nuts when they strike it rich with oil. (Except for the Norwegians. They remain grimly temperate.) Oil gushes and the rich get richer, true, but the poor have a hell of a party. When elephants defecate, birds feast.
Everywhere I’ve traveled the oil trail, I’ve witnessed it. The explosive chain reaction of oil-heated shopping sprees boosts economies now geared to selling crap no one ever thought they needed before: a blender to make smoothies in the Arctic; life insurance, guns, porcelain Santas; smack, crack, and mouthwash ; bagels and cream cheese flown in to go with the smoked salmon in Alaska (I appreciated that); toilets, DVD players, televisions (actually, televisions before toilets, always); Nobel Prize winners (the University of Texas bought several when gushers were found under its school properties); door locks, light-up crucifixes, lipstick (deep in the Amazon), fake weight-control pills, American toothpaste, cars that don’t fit the roads, extra wars (“Oil will be our weapon to win back Karabakh!” said Baba until BP vetoed the idea); vacations, battery-operated toys, porn, scuba gear; and lots of shoes.
The jet fuel for such potlatches of quick riches are those hard-currency, easy-come-easy-go jobs like rig roustabouts, bellboys, air traffic controllers, copter pilots, hairdressers, pickpockets, and all the infrastructure operators and camp followers oil requires and acquires: to lay pipe, to sell sandwiches to the guys laying pipe, girls laying the guys laying the pipe, jobs jacking up the jack-up rigs, sky-dumping the sludge, and inevitably, loads of work cleaning up the spill.
It’s a hell of a ride. It certainly happened here in Baku, in 1919 during the first Caspian oil boom.
Good times, crazy times, high-rolling times, the petroleum party that, inevitably, ends in a bust and hangovers. But here this time, the Azeris went straight to the hangover.
How could this happen? How could so many petrodollars escape without a couple pounds sterling falling out of BP’s stuffed pockets?
What the hell went wrong? How could this nation with oil pouring out its eyeballs turn into economic roadkill?
What happened? BP happened. The Contract of the Century happened. Under the Hippie President’s deal with American Oil Company (AMOCO), Azeris kept 30 percent of the oil to sell. But under Baba’s Contract of the Century, Azerbaijan’s share starts at just 10 percent. Looks like a pretty grim century ahead for the Azeris.
Let’s do a calculation. BP has its long straw into a 5.4-billion-barrel reserve. At say, $100 a barrel, with a 90/10 split, that’s half a trillion dollars for BP and peanut butter sandwiches for Azerbaijan.3
BP didn’t even pay the contract’s meager fee. A confidential U.S. State Department cable, retrieved by my good friend David Leigh at The Guardian, says Baba complained to BP that they cheated his treasury out of $10 billion. The split was supposed to change from 10 percent to 20 percent for Azeris years ago. When BP didn’t pay, Baba threw a shit-fit, called in BP’s local chief, and threatened to expose the company:“[Aliyev] will make public that BP is stealing our oil.”
BP’s man grinned at Baba. He did not have to say, Go ahead, Baba, let’s have a public audit of the contract payments. The audit will have to go back to the $140 million and who knows what else that has disappeared. Feeling lucky, Baba?
The autocrat obviously chose to toddle off into a corner and chew his peanut butter sandwich in moody silence. And he agreed to give BP an extension of its contract. (The United States later sweetened the pot with hints of weapons Baba’s military could toy with.)
But peanut butter isn’t nothing. The state still gets some of the oil. So then, why are these Azeris literally starving?
At least three sources gave me the answer, linking hunger and the nation’s collapse to the Contract of the Century, the coup d’état, and the missing millions. But like our Greenie at the diner, they panicked once I had the camera turned on. I’m not blaming them, I’m just saying I was a stuck duck.
That left me with only one option: the Crazy Lady.
BP WORKERS’ HOUSING COMPOUND, BAKU
We found her in the oil workers’ housing block in a dumpy part of Baku, in one of the tenement’s top-floor rooms, like the Madwoman of Chaillot. The buildings here are a mixture of Soviet grim and Third World decay. Nevertheless, 95 percent of the Azeri population would sell their children to live in these dumps.
“She’s crazy,” our translator told me.
Mirvari Gahramanli did not seem nuts to me. Schooled in several languages and once the highest-ranking female in the state oil company, she headed an organization for the protection of oil workers’ rights. That sounds like a union to me, but BP won’t recognize, and Baba won’t tolerate, real unions.
A union would not do much good. She pointed out that BP is actually banned from paying wages above the bread-and-water salaries earned in other parts of the so-called economy of Azerbaijan. It’s right there in the Contract of the Century. She spoke with authority about how it went down: listing names and dates and the history of the Con Job of the Century.
That’s why Mirvari’s crazy. She’ll say anything, even on camera. Even about the Twelfth Sexiest Woman in the World, who, she tells me, is seizing control of the social welfare money BP donates to help “the small people” (as BP’s chairman calls us).
Before I left, I asked Mirvari about a photo on the shelf behind her desk. In it, she is standing in front of a line of policemen, a wall of riot shields and clubs. By herself, Mirvari is holding back the entire phalanx. It was like that man in Tianamen Square standing in front of the tanks.
What she didn’t have on the shelf were the photos taken moments later. Mirvari opened a special file in her computer: There she is on the ground after the cops have beaten the shit out of her. Then she was jailed. Then she was beaten up again, then jailed twice more. So far.
Crazy.
But BP believes in love, not war. They offered Mirvari money. She said no. She said, “Pay your ill workers the money you owe them.” BP said no.
But they did paint her hallway. BP painted it eco-green like their gas stations. That’s the yin-yang of oil dictatorship. Baba does the beatings, BP does the paint-over.
And I thought: Fuck global warming. This is what will burn down our planet: placing cash and kisses in the hands of the petro-police state, while its other hand smacks down and jails a sweet lady like Mirvari; that makes oil rig workers accept a daily dance with death because to speak up is to starve; that makes you a prisoner in an unnumbered cell; that makes you look into the eyes of the ones you love and ask, Will you turn me in?
Did you know I’m writing this wearing a goddamn breathing mask? Asthma. Do I have to buy back the sky from BP and Exxon so I can breathe, so my kids can breathe? Are we ready to choke while the military police ensure we sing Baba’s anthem? Contract of the Century? Who the hell gave BP the right to buy our century?
Yes, Badpenny’s right. I say fuck too much. But I look at this world and I don’t know what else to say.
Back at the hotel we were greeted by Larry, Moe, and Curly, the three stooges the MSN had sent to watch us—and make sure we knew they were watching us (“Our fan club!” said our fixer). This forced me to wonder how long before Baba’s boys would come ’round to “chat” with Mirvari about our visit. I thought about the Green candidate’s goofy statement that telling the world the truth about corruption, coups, and crude would only be “serving the purposes of Israel.”
The phrase came back to me now—and its ancient origin, Genesis 32, a favorite of us atheists. Did Professor Greenie know it?
If you’ve forgotten, here is the gist: Jacob was scared shitless that his brutal brother Esau, like the meaty messenger of the MSN, would beat him to death.
The Green professor looked to the safety of our British diplomatic power to protect him from his fellow Azeri, just as Jacob begged God to “stay my brother’s hand.” God, as usual, was silent.
In the Bible story, darkness falls and Jacob is suddenly attacked by a demon, a dark angel. They struggle all night. As dawn comes, Jacob, unvanquished, won’t let the attacker go—until the dark spirit, the dark angel of Jacob’s own fear and guilt and complicity, agrees to bless him. This was the blessing: The Angel told Jacob he wouldn’t be Jacob anymore. From now on, his name would be Israel, that is, “He who has wrestled with God.” Then Israel/Jacob crossed the sea to the land of Edom, to confront his brother without fear.
Mirvari told me, despite not winning a single round against BP, “I don’t feel like a loser. If you don’t fight, then you are a loser.” She has wrestled her own dark angels and defeated them. She has crossed into Edom fearless; she is beyond their reach now. Mirvari has won her freedom within herself. Baba’s goons cannot beat it out of her, nor BP buy it.
