Azerbaijan internal troops have arrested 55 people following anti-government protests against the price rises and unemployment that broke out in the Caspian nation’s Siyazan region on Jan. 12-13, the Azerbaijan Press Agency reported.
Azerbaijan’s General Prosecutor’s Office and Interior Ministry said the arrested protesters had “completely violated public order and the legitimate demands of the government’s representatives, and committed illegal actions that disrupted the normal functioning of transport, enterprises, institutions and organizations.”
The authorities in Baku have blamed opposition parties People’s Front Party and Musavat Party for stirring up public unrest around the country that led to unauthorized rallies in several cities, including Siyazan, a city on the coast of the Caspian Sea.
But there was skepticism on social media about the opposition orchestrating the protests. Some commentators suggested the government was scapegoating the opposition in the face of widespread public anger over government mishandling of the economy.
Xalid Bagirov, a lawyer who has come to prominence in the country for defending political prisoners, said in a post on Facebook that the current protests reminded him of unrest seen in the country in the 1980s, and that the government’s response was similar.
“That time the government called the protesters drug addicts, and now they’re saying that people are protesting against rises in the price of alcohol, and so on,” Bagirov wrote.
Azerbaijan’s current economic problems started in December, when the government took a long-postponed decision to unpeg the Azeri currency, the manat, from the U.S. dollar. As soon as the government released its tight control on exchange rates on Dec. 21, the manat nosedived, losing 32 percent of its value in just a few hours.
The currency has since stabilized somewhat: according to the country’s central bank, the official exchange rate of the manat to the dollar on Jan. 14 was AZN 1.5706 – a 0.15 percent rise comparing to the previous day.
However, in AzerTurk Bank, the only commercial bank currently selling the U.S. dollars in Azerbaijan, the manat was being sold at AZN 1.6320 to the dollar, and there were long queues of people waiting to buy currency. According to Reuters, at the black market the exchange rate was ANZ 1.8 to dollar on Jan. 14.
In an effort to prop up the faltering currency, the central bank has ordered all currency exchanges outside bank branches to close, apart from a few in hotels and airports.
“The banks have a sufficiently broad servicing infrastructure to provide the population with access to banking services,” the central bank said in a statement.
Oil-rich Azerbaijani’s economic problems are connected to the steep fall in the price of oil: on Jan. 13 the price of Azeri Light crude on the London market fell by $0.37 or 1.16 percent, to $31.55 a barrel.
Some three-quarters of Azerbaijan’s export earnings came from energy before the oil price began to collapse in 2014.
The latest outbreak of public unrest in the country comes amid rising inflation – annual inflation in December stood at 7.6 percent – and increased unemployment due to the depressed economy.
The International Monetary Fund predicts growth of the Azeri economy by 2.5 percent in 2016, compared to 4 percent in 2015.
Kyiv Post intern Gulnar Salimova can be reached at [email protected]
