Azerbaijan: Tourist attraction or Hell on Earth?

On May 11, 2025, Dennis Lennox described in The Chrisian Post his travel to Azerbaijan, “a country at the crossroad of everything.” He describes the country’s rich history and suggests the capital Baku “could be the TV double for a random European city.” There is a danger to parachuting into a place and trusting interlocutors to be honest.

I learned this lesson during my first trip to Azerbaijan. I gave a guest lecture at one of the country’s top universities. Professors and students sang the regime’s praises, spoke of its development, and praised President Ilham Aliyev’s wisdom and tolerance. One professor offered me a lift back to my hotel. “Don’t believe a word you just heard,” he warned me. A few days later, I drove around the country beyond the swank stores like Bulgari and Bugatti that line the waterfront in Baku and that tourists visit, but few Azerbaijanis outside the ruling elite can afford.

What I saw just outside Baku was astounding: Hezbollah flags flying openly in Nardaran, a town just 15 miles away from the center of Baku. Indeed, some parts of the country could be the TV double for Beirut or Baghdad, not just Berlin or Brussels. A little further on, I visited mountain villages without electricity or running water, an astounding juxtaposition to the tourist areas of Baku. Such deprivation is more shocking given Azerbaijan’s vast hydrocarbon wealth. Azerbaijan receives tens of billions of dollars each year both through its partnership with BP and Russia’s Lukoil, and by pumping oil from the Islamic Republic of Iran in a swap scheme.

Unfortunately, most Azerbaijanis do not benefit from this nearly as much as the ruling Aliyev family does or, for that matter, Russian President Vladimir Putin or his Turkish counterpart Recep Tayyip Erdoğan. Azerbaijan’s per capita income is below that of neighboring Armenia and Georgia, even though neither of those neighbors has oil or gas income. The reason is simple: Azerbaijan’s leaders siphon off its natural wealth to London real estate and offshore banks while their own citizens scramble for food.

First impressions can likewise be misleading regarding religious freedom. True, there are both Christians and Jews in Azerbaijan living alongside the majority Muslim population, just as there are Muslims and Jews in Armenia, living alongside its majority Christian population. There is an important difference, however. In Armenia, the religious diversity is organic; in Azerbaijan, the churches and synagogues and the various spokesman for the communities are little more than living museum exhibits. Azerbaijani Christian priests must say the right thing, lest they find themselves in prison or worse. This is why, on June 5, 2025, the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom will host a special hearing on Azerbaijan, something it need not do for Armenia and Georgia.

In its most recent report, the Commission urged the State Department to maintain Azerbaijan on the Special Watch List for countries violating or otherwise repressing religious freedom. It is not surprising Lennox’s interlocutors would be so fearful of depicting Azerbaijan as anything other than a tolerant paradise.  Freedom House, which measures political freedoms, gives Azerbaijan a score of seven out of 100, a lower score than China, Russia, and Iran, and just barely above the Taliban’s Afghanistan and North Korea. Just as North Koreans praise the Dear Leader, so too do Azeris praise the Aliyev regime. Internal security is everywhere, and even a hint of criticism can lead to long prison terms.

Perhaps the most troubling aspect of Lennox’s brief visit to Azerbaijan was his comment that, “Yes, the whole Armenian subject is complicated, but hopefully, a proposed peace deal will resolve the matter if Armenia is willing to move out of Vladimir Putin’s orbit.” First, the Armenian “subject” is no more complicated than in Nigeria and China whose regimes repress religious freedom and repress, imprison, if not slaughter Christians due to their faith.

History matters: Nagorno-Karabakh was a Christian-populated region for more than 1,300 years. Even under Persian domination in the 17th, 18th, and early 19th centuries, it remained Christian as Muslim rulers allowed the Christians to maintain their language, churches, and religion. The Ottoman Empire tried to invade Armenia and Nagorno-Karabakh after their early 20th-century independence as a second and final chapter to the Armenian Genocide. The Armenians rebuffed the Ottoman (and Azeri) attacks, but they were no match for the Soviet Union, which subsumed the entirety of the Caucasus. Joseph Stalin then awarded Nagorno-Karabakh to Azerbaijan, not because it was Azeri populated, but rather because it was not. His goal in the region? Gerrymander and create a jigsaw puzzle that would make each of the nominally ethnic republics dependent upon Moscow. Still, even then, Nagorno-Karabakh was an autonomous oblast.

There was a further irony: While Azerbaijan tried to locate Azeris into the region, few had roots in the area and so they returned to the Caspian shore.

As the Soviet Union collapsed, Nagorno-Karabakh’s residents petitioned for independence, as was their constitutional prerogative. A subsequent referendum found 99% support. Azerbaijani nationalists led pogroms in Baku and then sought to encircle and starve Nagorno-Karabakh to drive the Armenians out. They did not succeed in 1991, but they did in 2023.

In the years since, Azerbaijan has dynamited churches, razed graveyards, and sandblasted centuries-old inscriptions. The issue was never Armenia’s presence in Putin’s orbit. Armenia has pivoted unequivocally to the West. Aliyev’s father was a central committee member of the Soviet Union and the head of Azerbaijan’s KGB; culturally, Aliyev and Putin grew up in the same milieu. The problem is Aliyev’s claim that all of Armenia is his. Armenians recognize what Azerbaijanis fail to acknowledge that there is no real land dispute — there is an Azeri dispute about indigenous Christians existing in the heart of the Caucasus.

Azerbaijan can be a lovely place to visit as a tourist, but it can be Hell on earth for those forced to live there, especially if they hold sincere religious beliefs that they wish to practice freely.