TALKING DONKEYS, RAMADAN WITH BARACK, AND OUR "ONE TRUE FRIEND"
Atlantic Online
elli/2009/09/talking_donkeys_ramadan_with_barack_a nd_our_one_true_friend.php
Sept 2 2009
This morning, Azerbaijan’s Foreign Ministry whined that its U.S
.ambassador was invited to Hilary Clinton’s post-Ramadan feast but
NOT Barack Obama’s. Azerbaijan has been described as America’s "one
true friend" on the Caspian, a key ally in the thing formerly known
as the "war on terror," a major player in the U.S.-backed Baku Ceyhan
Tiblisi oil pipeline and BTE gas line, as well as the most important
"undecided" in the potential Nabucco pipeline, which is supposed to
break Russia’s ability to control European gas supplies at whim. Is
there trouble in the friendship? The experiences of a talking donkey
suggest that there is.
For the U.S., Azerbaijan–with its Russian, Georgian, Turkish, and
Iranian borders–has been too small and too strategic to fail. One
member of the country’s beleaguered opposition told me that from the
Azeri perspective the fall of the Soviet Union just moved the Politburo
from Moscow to Washington, which stepped in to provide security
guarantees, asking for pipelines and influence in return. One cost of
that friendship was that Azerbaijan wasn’t much of a democracy. In its
short modern history of the country, the State Department runs out of
euphemisms for lousy elections before mentioning that the country’s
parliament abolished presidential term limits in March of this year.
Despite that, President Aliyev (son of the previous President
Aliyev. Ahem.) appears to feel awfully insecure and is now engaging
in a crackdown on trivialities. Security forces recently arrested
two so-called "donkey bloggers" for posting on Youtube a donkey
answering questions at a fake press conference and praising the
government for its treatment of donkeys. Last month, state security
services detained the 43 Azerbaijanis who dared vote by text message
for an Armenian singing group in a Eurovision song contest. "When
I was called to the MNS, I thought they were arresting me for the
strong criticism of President Ilham Aliyev I’d written on Facebook. I
had even forgotten that I’d voted for Armenia. When in the MNS they
started to interrogate me about this, I almost burst out laughing,"
said Rovshan Nasirli, who was called to the ministry on August
12. "After they kept me for two hours in an empty room, two men came
to me, saying they worked for the main department of the MNS. One
had a list in his hand of all the people who voted for the Armenian
entry, and their addresses. They said that people like me should be
sent to prison. They said, ‘Today you vote for an Armenian, tomorrow
you will go to blow up the metro for them.’" Crackdowns can appear
to reaffirm the power of an angry paranoid state in the short term,
but in the long run they breed revolutions.
There are other, less seemingly trivial, issues afoot in
Azerbaijan. Recently, the country struck a deal to put some gas in
Russia’s pipeline. And after years of being the posterchild for
the Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative by publishing
its national oil contracts, it made two deals without revealing
the details.
Beyond doling out Ramadan invites, I’m not sure that the U.S. has the
attention, the strategic leeway, or the policy tools to ask more of
Azerbaijan now. But as the relationships between Europe, the Caucuses,
the Middle East, and Russia evolve, the U.S. is going to need more of
all three. More importantly, we’re going to need a more sophisticated
sense of our own role in the world, and a more nuanced sense of just
how important those pipelines are to us.
http://correspondents.theatlantic.com/lisa_margon