BAD BLOOD IN BAKU
Wednesday, 16 June 2010 17:28 |
Tags:Afghanistanaliyevarmenia-turkeyazerbaijankarabakhobamaState
Departmentusaforeignpolicy.com, by Thomas Goltz — If I were still a
journalist, I would have had juicy scoop last Saturday when I learned
of the imminent but still unannounced arrival in Azerbaijan of U.S.
Defense Secretary Robert Gates. Gates had been tasked with hitting the
reset button — there are a lot of those in the former Soviet Union
these days — on Washington’s increasingly problematic relationship
with Baku.
I learned of the emergency visit when an old friend of mine called
to say he knew I was in the Azerbaijani capital, and that his former
boss, a U.S. intelligence officer, wanted to buy me a few beers and
chat about my nearly 20-year hobby of reading tea leaves and goat
entrails in the Land of Az.
“The American charge d’affaires told me not to talk to you,
but he is State Department and I am not,” the official said —
I’m paraphrasing from memory here, but closely — putting initial
pleasantries out of the way. “I am here to set up the Gates visit
tomorrow. We finally decided to give the Azerbaijanis something before
this thing deteriorates any further.” Then he sort of smirked while
saying the following: “We frankly don’t care about human rights
or democracy-building, or Israel and Turkey, or peace in Karabakh
or Georgia, or even Azerbaijani energy. There is only one thing we
really care about right now, and that is Afghanistan.”
I was not surprised, but had to ask:
“Afghanistan,” he said, and then repeated the word.
Afghanistan.
Azerbaijan’s role in that war is fairly well known: The country has
donated a symbolic company of 90 soldiers (which has suffered no
casualties to date) and shared intelligence with the United States.
But Azerbaijan’s main contribution to the U.S.-led war effort
has been geographic: The country’s location in the Caucasus is a
gateway between Europe, the Middle East, and Central Asia, and Baku
has provided a vital transportation alternative by opening its air,
rail, and seaport space to NATO.
There has been no murmur of a threat to close or restrict the
Azerbaijan corridor, but even the remote possibility that the
Azerbaijanis would do so has apparently worried Pentagon contingency
planners — enough so that a decision was made to show Baku some
respect, in the form of a personal letter from President Barack
Obama to Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev. Delivering the missive
was the purpose of Gates’s visit, and news of the surprise stop-off
was regarded as important enough that the usual Associated Press and
Reuters stories about the visit and the letter were soon splashed
across the front pages of most international and virtually all
American newspapers — even small ones, such as my local rag in
Bozeman, Montana.
After the usual schmooze about Azerbaijan playing an important role
in regional and international security, energy issues, and the need
to seek a peaceful solution to the Karabakh conflict with Armenia
(and the obligatory, respectful nod toward Aliyev’s father), Obama
finally got to the point:
“I am aware of the fact that there are serious issues in our
relationship,” he wrote, “but I am confident that we can address them.”
I’ll say.
But whether the letter will help shore up the increasingly tattered
relationship is an open question, especially when it is all too clear
to Azerbaijani leaders that U.S. interests in their country are almost
entirely limited to the Kabul quagmire. What American politicians
fail to understand (or at least it seems to me) is that today’s
Azerbaijan is quite a different place than the chaotic, war-torn,
nearly failed state that the United States dealt with in its early
years of independence. Then, Azerbaijan was brought back from the
brink of self-destruction by the elder Aliyev, Heydar, the Soviet-era
strongman who clawed his way back to power in Baku in 1993. At the
time, Azerbaijan was more or less without friends other than the
international oil companies seeking to cash in on its natural riches,
and proud Heydar Aliyev was obliged to endure all manner of slights
to survive.
But when Ilham “inherited” the presidency upon Heydar’s death in 2003,
he also inherited a vastly different state than the one Heydar ruled
in the 1990s. The trickle of oil- and gas-related wealth of the 1990s
had started to turn into a river of cash (GDP was growing more than 36
percent a year as of 2006), and the little Caspian country of 8 million
had started to attract so many flatterers that my Azerbaijani friends
— at least the ones with a sense of perspective — have started to
worry about a growing arrogance in Baku, one summed up by a sense
that America needs Azerbaijan more than Azerbaijan needs America.
“Our attitude is that Washington should stop thinking of Azerbaijan
in terms of Afghanistan and start thinking of Azerbaijan in terms
of Azerbaijan,” my old pal Araz Azimov, now deputy foreign affairs
minister, told me. “The official attitude as enunciated by the
president is, ‘We want respect.'”
Thus, it was not surprising to hear whispers in the corridors of power
that Aliyev was not as pleased with Obama’s letter as the copy churned
out by Gates’s hack pack would suggest, and that the downward spiral
will continue. Although it is true that he was preparing for a Eurasian
summit in Istanbul the next day, it was more than notable that Alyev
did not invite Gates to the presidential dinner table, appointing the
Azerbaijani defense minister to assume the obligatory hosting duties
instead — which Gates, in turn, declined to accept, thus allowing
the Americans to violate yet another Caucasian social protocol.
Indeed, from the Azerbaijani perspective, the list of American insults
is long and growing longer.
The most galling of these was and remains the Armenian diaspora-driven
Section 907 caveat to the Freedom Support Act passed by Congress
in 1992, which restricted all U.S. government-to-government aid to
Baku until Azerbaijan essentially capitulated in its vicious war with
Armenia over mountainous (“Nagorno”) Karabakh, a contested region that
is internationally recognized as part of Azerbaijan but has remained
under Armenian occupation since the fall of the Soviet Union. The loss
of the territory — some 15 percent of Azerbaijan — deeply grates in
Baku, and despite multiple meetings between various Azerbaijani and
American presidents over the years, there has been no real progress,
and Azerbaijanis increasingly (and vocally) mutter about the United
States not being a completely honest broker. They’ve got a point:
Section 907 is still on the books, identifying Azerbaijan as the
aggressor. Although whittled down under Bill Clinton’s administration
and suspended under George W. Bush’s after 9/11, the legal caveat
has never been officially lifted and thus still makes Azerbaijan a
quasi-pariah state.
Compounding that impression was last year’s initiative by the Obama
administration to rejuvenate relations between Armenia and Turkey
at Azerbaijan’s expense, namely by celebrating reconciliation by
opening the Turkish-Armenian frontier — closed in 1993 by Turkey
in an act of solidarity with Azerbaijan — without a concomitant
Armenian withdrawal from at least part of Karabakh. The details of
the diplomacy involved in the so-called “Turkish-Armenian Protocols”
are truly byzantine, but suffice it to say that Baku effectively forced
Ankara to publicly announce that Karabakh was included in the package,
which in turn led to a public denial by Armenia and the scuttling of
the Obama-inspired accords.
The restoration of the Turkish-Azerbaijani alliance (encapsulated
in the local slogan “one nation, two countries”) and the continued
closure of the Turkish-Armenian frontier was regarded as a nearly
existential diplomatic victory for Baku, and proof of the little
country’s ability to swing its weight in the international arena.
But still the diplomatic slights continue: There has been no U.S.
ambassador in Baku since July 2008, which has been taken as a sign of
Washington’s indifference or displeasure. Last month, Deputy Assistant
Secretary of State Matthew Bryza was finally nominated — though he
has yet to be confirmed — to the job. But Bryza’s history as the U.S.
point man in the Karabakh negotiations, and identification with U.S.
governments’ distracted handling of them, has left him unpopular with
both many Azerbaijanis and especially diaspora Armenians, neither of
whom consider him a good-faith arbiter of the conflict.
Azerbaijan was also snubbed in April when Aliyev was not invited to the
47-country Nuclear Security Summit in Washington, which was attended by
the leaders of all of Azerbaijan’s neighbors except Iran — despite the
fact that Azerbaijan, as a U.S.-aligned front-line state, would find
itself in the thick of any action should push come to shove against
Tehran. (An anonymous U.S. diplomat told the Azerbaijani press agency
Turan that “It was Ilham Aliyev’s personal choice” not to attend the
conference, but didn’t address whether he had been invited.)
Taken even more personally in Baku was an article that ran on the
front page of the Washington Post in March that teasingly alleged that
Aliyev’s 11-year-old son owned millions of dollars’ worth of Dubai
real estate. According to an Azerbaijani diplomat friend of mine,
the piece so infuriated Aliyev that he was literally gasping with rage.
“As a politician, Ilham can take his hits,” said my friend. “But they
were attacking his family.” The president, he said, was convinced
the story was fed to the Post by the State Department in an effort
to undermine his legitimacy.
It could be worse, and one day probably will be. Azerbaijanis are
perfectly aware of the aforementioned intelligence officer’s diplomatic
calculus, and aware that it cuts both ways. Washington may only see
Baku as a stop on the way to Kabul, but it’s a necessary stop — if
he were so inclined, Aliyev could make life very difficult for the
U.S. military. Word in Baku has it that Hillary Clinton is on her way
here soon to show some more respect, to make sure that doesn’t happen.
But then, Azerbaijan has always fought for a place on the world stage.
On a visit to London earlier this year, I was taken out to lunch by
the Azerbaijani ambassador, who later invited me back to his private
room in the embassy for tea. The walls were festooned with photographs
from his professional life — as a much younger man with hair on his
head, accompanying Heydar Aliyev to his state visit to the Clinton
White House in 1998; a picture with the Canadian prime minister when
he was elevated to ambassador to Ottawa; he and his wife boarding a
fancy, horse-drawn carriage to present his credentials to the Queen
of England.
And then there he was again, smiling broadly, next to a very
vigorous-looking Heydar Aliyev in the company of Joseph Stalin and
Winston Churchill.
“Madame Tussauds,” the ambassador explained. “Sadly, it was only a
temporary exhibit.”
From: A. Papazian
http://www.armeniadiaspora.com/news/article-hits/1498-bad-blood-in-baku.html