Life Amid The Derricks: The Other Side Of Baku's Boom - AFP

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"Just on the southern edge of the capital Baku, this section of the Absheron peninsula is a giant wasteland, where even the dust is saturated with oil and the land is covered with the rusting hulks of machinery, ageing oil wells, gritty pools and random debris.

The only things that seem to be growing in this nightmarish landscape are the oil derricks, but it is nevertheless populated by hundreds of families. Aside from them, only the occasional oil company employee drives though this rough terrain sandwiched between a highway and the coastline. Most of the residents here are some of the 750,000 internally displaced refugees from areas that are today controlled by Armenian forces.

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As for the odor, it is so strong in the burning summer months that it becomes "difficult to breathe," said another inhabitant, Shahin Huseynov. Open and smiling, residents are proud to display their homes -- an amalgamation of unfinished buildings covered with scrap metal -- as well as their surrounding environment -- a bare and oil-covered terrain where their chickens and ducks live, their feet covered in oil. Though they are provided with water, gas, and electricity by the government, and telephone and television function, they face a host of other problems such as a lack of transportation.

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Meanwhile the capital Baku last week celebrated the opening ceremony of the ultra-modern four-billion-dollar Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan pipeline which is expected to boost oil exports but the refugees remain bitter. "The government will get more money but where will it go?" asked Rahman Shahmammadov, a local 40-year-old."

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http://www.bakutoday.net/view.php?d=13602