When I decided that the first Azerbaijani-American Youth Conference would be an interesting column topic, it was with the assumption that most readers, like me, would struggle to spell its name and locate it on a map.

Azerbaijan, a secular Muslim country located between Iran and Russia, is a former Soviet satellite with a history of conflict with neighboring Armenia. The population is ethnically Azeri; there are also about 20-30 million Azeris living in Iran, while the population of Azerbaijan itself is only 8 million.

Seemingly unknown to the multitude of students streaming in to the dining halls below, the conference drew about 50 attendees, most of them Azeri, and took place in Covel Commons on Saturday.

The conference was put on by the Azerbaijani American Council of California.

Javid Huseynov, a doctorate student at UC Irvine, said the purpose of the event was to strengthen ties between Azeri communities from a variety of countries now residing in the United States. There are 400,000 Azeris in the United States, with over 100,000 of those living in California, he said.

With Russia trying to strengthen its hold on the region and American-Iranian relations becoming more tense everyday, our relations with their neighbor, Azerbaijan, will be important.

It is a chance to secure friendship and promote democratic values in a country that has both ties to a large population of Iran and huge oil reserves.

The Azeri population in Iran has nationalistic tendencies, and recently they have staged protests due to the economic situation in the region, said journalist Abolfazl Bahadori.

Bahadori is a graphic designer who works part-time for Radio Liberty, a U.S.-sponsored radio station based in Prague that broadcasts to Azerbaijan. He reports specifically about the Azeri population in Iran.

There are no U.S.-backed radio stations broadcasting to Iran in anything but Persian, perhaps missing an entire population that we could be communicating with, he said.

With Azerbaijan's key location and economic growth, I wondered why there was not more interest in the conference outside of the Azeri community. The only non-Azeris that I met were two Turkish USC students hoping to demonstrate Turkish solidarity with Azerbaijan.

With few oil-rich democracies and fewer Muslim democracies, the U.S. should show greater interest, and look to promote Azerbaijan's transition from Soviet satellite to a democratic nation.

International monitors of the 2005 election of President Ilham Aliyev found the elections to be tainted by fraud.

Huseynov said because Azerbaijan only gained its independence fifteen years ago, they are becoming democratic "in an evolutionary way."

Because of their membership in the Council of Europe and other ties
with the west, "it is inevitable that they fall under European norms" and become increasingly democratic, he said.

The U.S. already has strong economic ties with Azerbaijan. Their newest oil pipeline spans 1100 miles and is a U.S.-backed project, said Deputy Counsel General Elman Abdullayev.

For the U.S., Azerbaijan represents an opportunity to encourage democracy in a primarily Muslim and oil-rich nation, a chance that the U.S. must not let slip away.

For the average UCLA student, the Azerbaijani conference represents the multitude of opportunities that exist right under our noses, or in this case, right above our dining halls.

/By Jennifer Mishory - Daily Bruin Reporter
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Derek Liu/Daily Bruin

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