Those first four contacts made it easier for other Azeris to link up with him.
Figures show that there are around 10-20 million Azeris in Iran - around a fifth of the country's population.
And, even though Russia sold a lot of arms to Armenia in the mid-1990s, it sold some to the Azeris too.
An opposition leader and former prime minister, Ferenc Gyurcsany, says while in office he rejected a deal offered by the Azeris.
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Although the wealth on display in central Baku does not extend even to the city's suburbs, ordinary Azeris have enjoyed rising incomes.
Tajiks speak Persian, whereas Azeris, Turkmen, Uzbeks and Kazakhs speak Turkic languages.
But Armenia gets a lot of its oil and gas from Iran, a vital supplier during its war against the Azeris over Karabakh.
It has a defence treaty with Turkey, but so far the Turks have not risked confronting Russia by giving the Azeris much help.
Today, around nine million ethnic Azeris live in Azerbaijan.
Still, the Azeris are probably exaggerating the arms imbalance.
He was one of the first western oilmen to build up contacts in Azerbaijan as the Soviet Union was crumbling, and he persuaded the Azeris to let him represent them to the world oil industry.
He also said there was no resolution so far of the basic contradiction between the two sides: the Azeris demand that its territorial integrity be maintained, and the Armenian demand that Armenians in Karabakh had a natural right to self-determination.
Sharing cramped geographic quarters with Iran, Russia, Georgia, and Armenia is no easy task, yet Azeris in this Muslim-majority country enjoy one of the most pro-Western, liberalized societies in the region (consider that women gained the right to vote in pre-Soviet Azerbaijan in 1919, narrowly beating out the enactment of the Nineteenth Amendment).
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