BAKU, June 4: Some 10,000 anti-government protesters rallied in the capital of oil-rich Azerbaijan calling for regime change in the former Soviet republic on Saturday. In the first opposition rally not to have been crushed by police since 2003 presidential polls ended in violence, protestors carried signs with the phrase “we want freedom” superimposed onto portraits of US President George Bush.

Police officials, who mobilized hundreds of riot police to encircle the rally, told state-owned media that less than 3,000 people attended the protest, but journalists estimated the turnout at 10,000.

In a flashback to the peaceful revolt that ousted an entrenched regime in Ukraine last year, members of the Yeni Fikir youth movement wore orange shirts and headbands and directed shouts of ‘step down’ at the country’s leadership.

“We want a normal government, we want this regime to give up power,” said Ruslan Bashirli, the leader of Yeni Fikir, one of the youth protest groups that have mushroomed in Azerbaijan ahead of a parliamentary election scheduled for November.

Mr Bashirli said the group would push for a ‘peaceful, velvet revolution’ during the elections. The government of President Ilham Aliyev, who inherited the top post from his father Heydar Aliyev in contested 2003 elections, has cracked down on the opposition, with police routinely beating and imprisoning protestors.

“If the elections are not free, prepare to see every village and every street demand Aliyev’s ouster,” Ali Kerimli, leader of the opposition Popular Front of Azerbaijan party, told the rally.

A bloc of opposition parties participating in the protest issued a resolution demanding fair treatment for their candidates in the coming elections and called for the authorities to release the relative of a prominent exiled politician allegedly taken into custody on Friday.

The opposition said Almaz Guliyeva, a British citizen and the niece of Azerbaijan’s ex-parliamentary speaker Rasul Guliyev, had to be hospitalized with heart trouble after a pistol was planted on her when she arrived in Baku on a flight from London.—AFP