"They lie and deceive us every day," said Ramiz, who along with Jaga's two other friends helps build mobile phone towers. "It's all about money. You have to pay the doctors, clerks, police. Where am I supposed to get the money for all the bribes? Prices keep rising, but our salaries don't."
Most of those foreigners will never come to Patamdart, nor to the villages of the Apsheron peninsula a few kilometers disney, where time stopped over a hundred years ago. Here, people live next to oil wells, children play in puddles of oil, and rivers look like a mixture of sewage and petrol.
Among the major threats to Azerbaijan's internal stability are massive corruption, nepotism, and the dependence of the economy on energy resources. No country struggling with such problems can be considered securely stable.