Azerbaijani president collapses during TV speech

AZERBAIJAN’S long-serving president Haydar Aliyev collapsed while delivering a televised speech yesterday, briefly revived, but fell again.

The live broadcast showed the 79-year-old president of the oil-rich Caspian state clutch his heart and fall during a speech delivered to an assembly of dignitaries in the Palace of the Republic in the heart of the capital.

The television showed the audience applauding, then the group was heard to gasp. Bodyguards could be seen rushing towards him before transmission stopped.

The frail-looking leader who many Azeris call “Baba” (Grandfather) reappeared on television screens 12 minutes later to a standing ovation from the hall.

“I have apparently been bewitched by the evil eye. But I'm fine, as you see,” he said before resuming his speech.

Minutes later he collapsed again, knocking his head on the podium. Transmission stopped again and the audience was led from the hall.

Aliyev was Azerbaijan’s leader under Soviet rule and returned to power in 1993 after turmoil in the country of eight million following the fall of communism.

He has had a number of medical problems, requiring heart surgery in 1999 and a hernia operation last month in the US.

He strengthened his political position last year by securing a big “yes” vote in a referendum amending the constitution and making the prime minister the second most important figure in the country. Opponents alleged the vote was rigged and the changes enabled him to appoint as prime minister and eventually as president his son, Ilgam, a senior official in the state oil company.

Last month 10,000 demonstrators paraded through Baku demanding Aliyev resign. Speakers accused him of failing to solve a protracted dispute with neighbouring Armenia over Nagorno-Karabakh.

Aliyev had planned to contest a presidential election in October to seek a second term under a constitution adopted in the 90s.

Aliyev, who aides have said has a photographic memory and can remember the names of people he met only briefly years ago, got his start in the notorious Soviet KGB security police, rising to run the Azeri wing of the service. He used the powerful post as a springboard to the republic’s top Communist Party job in 1969, serving until 1982 when he was appointed to the Soviet Union’s ruling politburo, a rare honour for a non-Russian. After he left for Moscow, a relative held the Azerbaijan post, but Aliyev was assumed to be still calling the shots.

Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev sacked Aliyev in 1987, apparently for not sharing his enthusiasm for reforms.

Some believed his last chapter had been written.

Instead, Aliyev returned from Moscow to his native Nakhchivan region, a remote enclave cut off from the rest of the republic, and quietly planned his political comeback.

Leading politicians begged him to return to the capital when the country was on the brink of civil war in 1993. He quickly consolidated his grip, playing off rivals against one another.