COULD THIS BE ISIL’S NEXT TARGET?
The National Interest Group
Oct 29 2014
Audrey L. Altstadt
October 29, 2014
Could ISIL gain traction in Azerbaijan? Amid the welter of analyses
about ISIL in Syria and Iraq, little attention has been paid to the
potential impact of ISIL or other Islamic extremist movements in
another important area–namely, the strategically sensitive south
Caucasus region and especially energy-rich Azerbaijan. The anti-ISIL
plan for a Kurdish autonomous entity has even greater implications
for the south Caucasus and its several secessionist movements.
First, the matter of ISIL. Located just northeast of Iraq, Azerbaijan
has a mostly Shi’ite population with a Sunni minority. The state is
secular, but President Ilham Aliyev has raised the specter of Islamic
extremists in the north where his country borders Russia along the
Caucasus Mountains. Twenty-six alleged fighters for Islamist groups,
ISIL among them, were arrested last week on their return to Azerbaijan.
Is Azerbaijan an Iraq-in-the-making? How real is the threat? How can
we tell?
Azerbaijan is unlike Iraq in numerous meaningful ways. Neither
religious identity nor rhetoric has been a factor in Azerbaijani
politics for over a century. The leader of one Azerbaijani opposition
party commented that sectarian politics like those in Iraq are
“primitive.” The population of Azerbaijan though mostly Shi’ite
is Turkic. Its history of Shi’ite-Sunni cooperation, societal
modernization and emergent secularism goes back to the 19th century.
Azerbaijan’s reformers achieved short-lived victory in their republic
of 1918-20.
The arrival of the Bolsheviks in April 1920 led to the imposition of
violent, if sporadic, anti-religious campaigns, which were distinct
from the evolutionary secularizing efforts of the native elites. Thus,
the comparison between today’s Azerbaijan and Iraq, where secularism
was imposed mainly by the Ba’ath party since the late 1960s, shows the
greater longevity and depth of secular life in Azerbaijan. Tolerance
of religious difference, especially in Baku, is shown not merely by
the presence but by the growth over time of such non-native groups as
the Jewish community which grew rapidly in the early 20th century as
Jews fled pogroms in Russian and Ukraine. It remains active today. The
disappearance of the Baku’s long-established Armenian community and
closing of its church can be traced to the bitter and unresolved
conflict over Nagorno-Karabagh rather than a general intolerance of
Christians. Overall, religious expression is considered a personal
matter in Azerbaijan, and in society as a whole, people who attend
a mosque or wear the hijab are neither feared nor ostracized.
At the same time, it would be premature to suggest that Azerbaijan is
immune from Islamist appeals. The Sunni population in the north can
hardly be insulated against the radicalism of the north Caucasus,
but the nature of the spill-over remains murky. Some experts have
suggested that sectarian conflicts in the region have encouraged or
deepened divisions within Azerbaijani society, especially in rural
areas. But hard evidence is illusive.
The Aliyev regime’s designation of all sorts of religious people and
groups as Wahabbis or Salafis is unhelpful. Religious individuals are
persecuted without differentiation. Such broad-brush treatment impedes
efforts to get a clear reading on the type and depth of political uses
of Islam and the potential for future radicalism among Azerbaijanis.
Piety does not make a Muslim a radical.
If an extreme Islamist faction did exist, it would not have to be
large to be dangerous. Two factors could make it more dangerous.
First, discontent born of poverty or injustice feeds radicalism.
Despite oil wealth and the modernization of Baku, lingering
economic, social and political inequality contribute to Azerbaijan’s
vulnerability to Islamist appeals. Outside central Baku, poverty is
evident. People with Soviet-era educations cannot take advantage of
jobs in new industries and often cannot provide better education for
their children.
How many are affected? What are their alternatives? Is there an
emerging middle class, as the regime insists? Data on these matters
are not sufficient or sufficiently reliable to draw a definitive
conclusion. Bribery is endemic, and citizens report pressure to give
bribes even to get low-level jobs. A perception that the regime is
corrupt and unjust can push the populace toward a traditional pole
of morality, religion. Radical leaders could take advantage of such
a climate, and Azerbaijan’s ruling circles are missing opportunities
to address these problems.
Second, a regime that quashes open discussion and even mild dissent is
cutting off peaceful discourse and thereby fostering extremism. Recent
years have been marked by increasing government repression including
the marginalization of the genuinely democratic opposition parties.
Their offices and publications have been pushed out of the city center
or shut down. Election rallies have been blocked. Parliamentary
elections of 2010, which were deemed by international observers to
be neither free nor fair, led to the complete exclusion of opposition
parties from the National Assembly. With the failure of the democratic
opposition to protect itself, much less effect needed change, popular
interest in Islamist groups cannot be ruled out.
Nor are there other means for peaceful redress of grievances.
Independent human rights activists, journalists and bloggers have
been harassed, beaten, and arrested. This summer so many human rights
activists were arrested that one account characterized the list as a
“who’s who” of important civil society figures. Particularly shocking
are the beatings and torture of activists in jail, most recently Leyla
Yunus, a petite and diabetic woman with an international reputation.
NGOs including scholarly organizations have had bank accounts
frozen and offices raided and closed. Critical reports from Amnesty
International, Freedom House, the OSCE and other groups are dismissed
by officials in Baku as “anti-Azerbaijani.”
The regime stresses its security requirements, its need to maintain
independence, especially against Russia, and defend against
terrorists. These are real challenges. But it’s hard to see how
election monitors, human rights groups, and bloggers threaten
Azerbaijan’s independence.
Nor is religious extremism the only potential danger. Kurdish autonomy
is being considered a tool to contain ISIL and the “treatment”
here may be as volatile as the disease. Few Western analysts have
explored the broader implications of Kurdish autonomy and certainly
not for the south Caucasus. Such an arrangement for Iraq’s Kurds not
only affects Turkey’s Kurds, as all have conceded, but could lead
also to comparable demands by Iran’s Kurds living in the northwest
of that country bordering Iraq. As a frequently oppressed ethnic
and sectarian minority (Kurds are mostly Sunni) Iranian Kurds might
find autonomy flimsy and press for secession. Secession movements,
an urgent topic despite the outcome of Scotland’s referendum, affect
each state of the south Caucasus.
All demands for secession are used by Armenians to bolster arguments
for the self-proclaimed republic in Nagorno-Karabagh, in Soviet times
an autonomous region inside Azerbaijan populated mainly by Armenians.
Since the 1994 cease fire to a 6-year war, Armenian forces
have occupied that area and surrounding regions totaling about
17% of Azerbaijan’s territory. Azerbaijan has rejected the
secession-as-self-determination demand on the basis of preserving
its territorial integrity.
Here Azerbaijan must be wary of Russian meddling since Moscow has
both a military and more recently commercial treaty with Armenia.
Azerbaijan’s major ally is NATO-member Turkey that is itself on guard
against both Kurdish and Armenian territorial claims. Renewed fighting
over Nagorno-Karabagh could turn into a truly ugly regional conflict.
Neighboring Georgia likewise resists demands of ethnic minorities
that are supported by Russia. Both of Georgia’s secessionist regions,
Abkhazia and South Ossetia have Russian support, including the invasion
of Georgia in “defense” of the Ossetians in 2008. Russian President
Vladimir Putin’s revanchism early this year in Ukraine affirmed that
Russia can with impunity seize the territory of a neighboring sovereign
state using the pretext of claims to protect ethnic Russians. Neither
Georgia nor any other state of the south Caucasus has a significant
Russian minority but Russia has already claimed to protect Ossetians
and may well do the same for its Armenian allies or others. Secretary
of Defense Hagel’s trip to Tbilisi after the September NATO meeting,
reflected this linkage by discussing Georgia’s entry into NATO.
Nor is the impact of secession confined to the states of the south
Caucasus. Even the whiff of secession from Iran’s Kurds could, Tehran
surely fears, inspire a similar demand from the neighboring Turkic
population of Iran’s east Azerbaijan and Ardebil provinces. The
movement for reunification of Iranian (“southern”) Azerbaijan with
northern (now independent) Azerbaijan has been simmering since
the Soviet collapse. It is encouraged by groups and individuals in
the north. The vigorous support for the movement by Azerbaijan’s
first post-Soviet president Abulfez Elchibey was a particular point
of contention between Baku and Tehran. Iran stands to be hurt by
secessionist movements in its northwest, and paradoxically, it is
all that stands between a possible IS drive from Mosul to Baku.
Neighboring Russia and the Middle East, the entire south Caucasus is
vulnerable to events in both. The potential autonomy or secession
of the Kurds affects each of the three states, though differently
– Georgia and Azerbaijan stand to lose territory from successful
secessions bids while Armenia stands to gain. Similarly, Russia, which
has just used the secession-by-self-determination card in Ukraine
/Crimea can throw its weight on the same side of that argument to
weaken Georgia and Azerbaijan and support Armenia. Indeed, of the
various threats. Russian meddling is perhaps the greatest for the
region and especially for Georgia and Azerbaijan. But the danger of
Islamic extremism cannot be clearly assessed without more realistic
information from Azerbaijan. The attraction of radicalism itself
could be reduced if the Aliyev government were to establish and
protect civil society.
Audrey Altstadt is a fellow at Woodrow Wilson International Center for
Scholars and a Professor of History at the University of Massachusetts
Amherst. The opinions expressed in this piece are solely those of
the author.
http://nationalinterest.org/blog/the-buzz/could-be-isils-next-target-11563