A proudly kilt-wearing Scot who helped survivors of the Boxing Day tsunami has been appointed as the UK's new ambassador to Azerbaijan.
Fergus Auld, from Edinburgh, has taken up the post at a sensitive time, given that the Caucasus nation borders both Russia and Iran. But the life-long diplomat has seized the role with zest, spending a year learning Azerbaijani beforehand and wearing a kilt for his first meeting with the country's president Ilham Aliyev.
The dad-of-three was one of the first to be deployed to Thailand to help survivors of the Indian Ocean tsunami in 2004, which killed over 200,000 people. And he's getting stuck into his new job, already putting pressure on Azerbaijan to stand against Russia's invasion of Ukraine and squeezing the country on its mixed human rights record.
The 49-year-old said: “President Aliyev was completely poker faced when I bounded up in the kilt, but the pictures generated a lot of reaction in Azerbaijan. It is amazing how popular the film Braveheart is here. I’ve met people who’ve said they’ve watched it 15 times.
“[President Aliyev] told me: ‘In 20 years as President, I’ve never had an ambassador arrive in the country with language skills like that. That is a sign of respect and shows me that you want to understand my country deeply’."
Fergus began his career with the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office (FCDO) in 1999 but his first international deployment came in 2004 following the Boxing Day disaster, where he helped British police to liaise with their Thai counterparts to identify UK victims. Had his wife Amy not been pregnant with their second child, Fergus believes he might have been holidaying in a spot hit by the tsunami.
He added: “That was the first experience I had of being right in the middle of a crisis. As soon as I saw what had happened on the television, I immediately called the Embassy and as a Thai speaker I was part of the first team that went down to Phuket to help.
"Those three weeks were emotionally very difficult. It was very harrowing work. The scale of the devastation was just horrific.
"Just imagine being on a beach that should be a tropical paradise but instead you are seeing destruction everywhere. The stories of survivors really upset me.
"I accompanied the then Foreign Secretary Jack Straw to one meeting with a survivor who had lost her husband and two children. By the end, there wasn’t a dry eye in the room.
“There were success stories where we were able to reunite people who had lost each other and the sense of public service you get helping people in a crisis like that is one of the things that has kept me committed to the FCDO for 23 years.”
Fergus also has previous experience of managing the often-tricky relations between the UK and Russia. He received an OBE from the then Prince Charles following work in Moscow, dealing with the country's invasion of the Crimean peninsula in Ukraine.
The region has since been annexed by Vladimir Putin's forces, to international condemnation. Russian agents had also just carried out the fatal poisoning of the Putin critic and defector Alexander Litvinenko on British soil – a saga that has just been made into a drama starring David Tennant.
Russia looms over his work, particularly as Azerbaijan could hold the key to supplying Europe with oil and gas should Putin turn off the taps. BP has invested billions in Azerbaijan's energy industry over the last 30 years, and many of the 1,300 British citizens living in the country are Scots working in the sector.
But Fergus has also been able to help the country explore new, greener means of energy generation. The British Embassy in Baku supported a visit by Azerbaijani energy minister Parviv Shahbazov to an offshore windfarm in Kincardine, Fife, and the Energy Export Conference in Aberdeen – strengthening ties between the two countries at a vital time.
He added: "Of course, there are criticisms about aspects of Azerbaijan’s human rights record and as an ambassador and a friend of Azerbaijan, it is important that we have frank discussions about this. There will always be people who think the answer is not to engage but it is overwhelmingly in the UK’s interests for us to work together."
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