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Asia Times Online - Sept 28, 2004
http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/FI28Ak01.html
Iran at Sea over Azerbaijan
By Mahan Abedin
The visit of Iranian President Mohammad Khatami to the former Soviet
Republic of Azerbaijan early last month was generally met with cynicism
and lack of enthusiasm by the more nationalist elements of the press in
both countries. The Azeri opposition daily Muxalifat aptly captured the
mood when it dismissed Khatami's grandiose remarks that the border between
Iran and Azerbaijan is a "frontier of peace, friend****p and brotherhood"
as a deceptive statement made by the leader of an unfriendly country.
The tensions and mistrust on both sides are im****tant because they are
likely to have ramifications for the south Caucasus region and beyond. In
fact, Iranian-Azeri tensions and outside influences and pressures on the
latter may become the basis of a major conflict in the southern Caucasus.
This is all the more reason to analyze the relations between these two
states and highlight the areas that are most likely to give rise to
conflict.
The geopolitical space that is now the Republic of Azerbaijan had been an
Iranian territory for millennia before it was incor****ated into the
Russian empire at the beginning of the 19th century. The catalyst for
these changes was the two Iranian-Russo wars in 1804-13 and 1826-28. The
former ended with the Treaty of Gulistan, which ceded the majority of the
northern parts of Azerbaijan to Russian control. The infamous Treaty of
Turkamanchay, which concluded the hostilities of the late 1820s, in effect
completed Russia's domination of what quickly became known as "northern"
Azerbaijan. The sum effect of these hastily drawn treaties, which have
been a major Iranian grievance ever since, was to irreversibly divide
Azerbaijan into two distinct geopolitical and cultural spheres. In
retrospect, this was the most grievous damage inflicted on Iranian
territorial integrity since the Arab Islamic invasion of the 7th century.
"Northern" Azerbaijan became Russified over time, and the links with the
south were progressively eroded. However, the collapse of the czarist
wmpire in 1917 enabled the north to break away tem****arily and hastily
declare independence the following year. In a gesture that is now rarely
remembered, the US president at the time, Woodrow Wilson, warmly received
an Azeri delegation to the Paris peace conference. Privately, Wilson was
allegedly a sup****ter of Azeri independence. This was the first major
official US involvement with Azerbaijan, and 86 years later it may be
regarded as the harbinger of a close strategic relation****p between the
two states.
In April 1920, the newly constituted Bolshevik armies moved into
Azerbaijan and very quickly snuffed out the over-pretentious independent
Azeri government. The two-year experiment in independence, which many
believed was doomed to fail from the beginning, was at an end, and
Azerbaijan was absorbed into the new Soviet empire. Although the Soviet
Union modernized many aspects of Azeri life and improved the dreadful
living conditions of most of its citizens, it nonetheless inflicted damage
on the territorial integrity of the north. The Bolsheviks ceded the Azeri
territory of Zangezur to Armenia, thus ensuring the geographic
disconnection of the ethnically volatile ****hchivan region from the rest
of Azerbaijan. Moreover, the Soviet authorities periodically chipped away
at Azeri territory, dimini****ng its geopolitical space progressively. The
statistics speak for themselves: in 1920 Azeri territory amounted to
114,000 square kilometers, whereas on gaining independence in 1991 it had
shrunk to 86,000 square kilometers.
Meanwhile, Iranian or "southern" Azerbaijan developed on a massively
different historical trajectory. Azeris have dominated the Iranian state
since the advent of the Safavid Empire in the early 16th century. The
Safavids consolidated ****'ism in the country and Azeris proved to be the
most ardent exponents of Iranian ****'ism. The history of the Safavid
Empire is the history of the early Iranian nation-state, dominated as it
is by the twinned forces of Iranian nationalism and ****'ism. Despite
having a Turkic language, Azeris were at the forefront of resisting
eastern Ottoman expansion. In fact, the Azeri elite of the Safavid Empire
proved to be the Ottoman Turks' most persistent and pernicious enemies, in
effect weakening the Ottoman Empire and making it more vulnerable to the
encroachments of Western Christian powers. This historical process
contributed greatly to the cataclysmic decline of the Ottoman Empire in
the 19th century and its eventual destruction in 1924.
The myth that Azeris in Iran constitute an oppressed minority has only
held sway among extreme pan-Turkics in Baku and Ankara. Indeed, the
realities of modern Iran depict a very different picture from that of
pan-Turkic propaganda. While the total number of Azeris (including the
3-million-strong "Persianized" Azeri residents of Tehran) does not exceed
7 million, they have consistently punched well above their demographic
weight. Azeris have dominated the modern Iranian military since its
establishment in the 1920s. Moreover, a dispro****tionate number of Iranian
political elites have hailed from the Azeri minority. This was the case
with the former Pahlavi regime, just as much as it is the case with the
Islamic Republic that succeeded it in 1979. Indeed, Iran's supreme leader
Ayatollah Ali Khamenei is an ethnic Azeri and so is Rahim Safavi, the
overall commander of the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC) and the
most im****tant military-security official in the country.
The rapid breakup of the Soviet Union in the autumn of 1991 was greeted
with mixed blessings in Tehran. While Iran was more than happy to see the
Central Asian Muslim republics free from the shackles of Soviet communism,
this attitude did not apply to Azerbaijan. The primary Iranian concern was
that an independent Azerbaijan would act as a magnet for Iran's Azeri
community. While Iranian security officials were well aware that Azeris
would be most unreceptive to pan-Turkic and Azeri nationalist rhetoric,
nonetheless they feared that a secular and successful Azeri state could
sow dissension across the border.
These fears proved to be unfounded from the very beginning as the nascent
Azeri state was quickly engulfed with internal political instability and
an external conflict with Armenia over the disputed region of
Nagorno-Karabakh. The man at the center of all these disasters was Abulfaz
Elchibey, a closet academic and extreme Turkic nationalist. An orientalist
and Arabic scholar, he had once acted as an interpreter for a team of
Soviet engineers constructing a dam on Egypt's Nile River. In the chaos of
early Azeri independence, Elchibey moved to fill the political vacuum,
even though he was wholly unsuited for politics.
Elchibey was elected to the presidency in June 1992 and subsequently
presided over the near-disintegration of the nascent Azeri state. Apart
from his pan-Turkic rhetoric, Elchibey had campaigned on the platform of
moving Azerbaijan closer to Turkey, the United States and Israel; a move
that would arouse the suspicions of any government in Tehran, Islamic or
otherwise. However, it was Elchibey's political immaturity that most irked
the political and security elite in Tehran. Ignoring all diplomatic norms,
Elchibey openly called for Iranian Azeris to struggle for independence. He
demonstrated the same kind of catastrophic immaturity in his handling of
the conflict with Armenia and domestic Azeri politics. A combination of
extreme ineptitude and arrogance finally forced Elchibey to flee his
capital little more than a year after assuming office.
Elchibey's pan-Turkic rhetoric, his suppression of pro-Iranian forces in
Baku and his ill-conceived ideas of turning Azerbaijan into a bastion of
US and Israeli influence in the southern Caucasus tilted Iran toward
Armenia in the war over Nagorno-Karabakh. This produced an odd
geopolitical landscape with ultra-secular Turkey, a member of the North
Atlantic Treaty Organization and a reliable ally of the US, sup****ting
Muslim Azerbaijan and Iran, an Islamic state with a passionately
anti-American ideology, backing Western and Christian Armenia.
Iran's backing of Armenia may have been prompted by provocation, but the
tacit alliance between the two states made historical and geostrategic
sense. Aside from sharing a similar Indo-European heritage, Iranians and
Armenians always have been natural barriers to Turkic expansion in the
Caucasus and beyond. In the harsh and unstable geostrategic environment of
the late 20th century, these historical forces and interests converged to
keep Azerbaijan weak and dependent on the good faith of its giant neighbor
to the south. Indeed, at one stage during the most intense phase of the
Nagorno-Karabakh war, Iranian intervention saved Azerbaijan from almost
complete collapse. Nevertheless, overall, Iranian sup****t for Armenia was
instrumental in enabling the latter to not only uproot Azerbaijani
influence from Nagorno-Karabakh but to seize 20% of Azeri territory in the
process.
The rise of Heydar Aliyev did not significantly ease tensions with Iran. A
former high-ranking KGB (Committee for State Security) apparatchik and
first secretary of the Communist Party of Azerbaijan, Aliyev was an
experienced and shrewd politician. However, his authoritarian instincts
brought him into conflict with Iran. Aliyev cracked down hard on
pro-Iranian parties in Azerbaijan and attributed any form of Islamic
revival in the republic to Iranian interference. The Azeri security
services regularly rounded up pro-Iranian political activists on charges
of espionage and Islamic subversion. In fact, the Azeris, perhaps as a
result of US and Israeli pressures to talk up the "Islamic" threat from
Iran, were completely misreading Iranian ambitions in their country. As in
other parts of the Muslim regions of the former Soviet Union, the Iranians
were much less interested in spreading militant Islam than penetrating the
political, military, security and economic institutions of these emergent
states.
Aside from expanding commercial relations with Azerbaijan, the Iranians
relied on intensive covert and intelligence activities to consolidate
their influence in the country. In January 1995 the Iranians dedicated an
entire department of the Intelligence Ministry to espionage operations in
the former Soviet republic. Iranian penetration of the newly reconstituted
Azeri security services became so pervasive that in mid-1996 the Iranians
managed to uncover an extensive joint Azeri-Turkish espionage cell in
Tabriz, the capital of Iranian Azerbaijan. Aside from recruiting agents in
the provincial administration of Iranian Azerbaijan, this network's brief
included the dissemination of pan-Turkic propaganda and irredentist ideas.
According to well-informed sources, a senior Turkish intelligence officer
was apprehended by Iranian security. Even though the Turkish officer did
not have diplomatic immunity, the Iranians quickly returned him to Ankara
on the understanding that the Turkish government would drop its unfounded
accusations that Iran was giving sup****t to the Kurdistan Workers Party
(PKK).
Battle over resources
These political and ideological schisms are dwarfed by the prospect of
conflict over the legal status of the Caspian Sea and the energy resources
that are contained in it. The Iranian position has always been that the
legal status of the Caspian Sea must be based on the Iranian-Soviet
treaties of 1921 and 1940. The latter treaty stipulates that the Caspian
is an "Iranian and Soviet Sea" underpinned by the "principles of equality
and exclusivity". However, in March 1998 the Russian government, without
prior consultations with the Iranian side, communicated to the Aliyev
regime that Moscow would no longer have any objections to unilateral
offshore oil and gas development.
The arrival of Western oil companies in Azerbaijan and the development of
that country's offshore energy infrastructure were treated with the
greatest levels of concern in Tehran. This was accentuated by Iran missing
out on a lucrative deal to act as a transit route for the ex****t of Azeri
oil via the Persian Gulf. The Americans applied intense pressure to
persuade all parties concerned to replace the most convenient and
economically efficient route (ie Iran) with the Turkish ****t of Ceyhan -
the Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan route. Moreover, the Iranians feared that oil
exploration activities in the Caspian were beginning to encroach on its
yet to be determined territorial waters. Thus in early 2001, the Iranian
navy fired warning shots at an exploration boat belonging to BP and forced
it to sail away.
The ever-increasing concentration of US energy interests in Azerbaijan has
brought the country under greater US influence. This influence grew
exponentially after the terrorist assaults on September 11, 2001, to cover
security and military fields. Indeed, the Americans seized the op****tunity
to establish a visible military presence in Central Asia and the Caucasus.
Although publicly the Americans deny maintaining military forces in
Azerbaijan, the Iranians have on numerous occasions complained to the Baku
government about the presence of US military "advisers" in the country.
The Iranians are also concerned about the concentration of US signals
intelligence (SIGINT) resources in the south of the republic, close to the
border with Iran.
The primary Iranian concern is that Azerbaijan will be used as a base by
the Americans to subvert the Islamic republic in the event of a sudden
deterioration in Iranian-US relations. There are even concerns that US
aircraft may use air bases in the former Soviet republic to attack Iranian
nuclear infrastructure. To forestall this scenario, the Iranians have
unleashed a wave of threats at Azeri officials. In the event of Azeri
collaboration with the US in a conflict situation, the Iranians have
communicated to Azeri officials in no uncertain terms that they would
provide unqualified sup****t to the Armenians in a future war over the
"final" status of Nagorno-Karabakh. Given that 20% of Azeri territory
remains under Armenian occupation, this unqualified sup****t can only
result in the demise of the Azeri republic. This is a scenario that would
be most welcome to a significant constituency in Iranian Azerbaijan that
seeks Azeri "reunification" in the context of the Iranian nation-state.
Notwithstanding these threats and geopolitical maneuvers, it is clear that
both Iran and the Republic of Azerbaijan stand to lose from any potential
conflict over Caspian energy resources, as it will likely involve direct
Iranian-US confrontation. Given this lose-lose matrix, both sides have a
strong vested interest in forging a common position over the legal status
of the Caspian Sea. Once this is achieved the sanctimonious high officials
of the Islamic Republic will have little need for grandiose statements.
[Mahan Abedin is the editor of Terrorism Monitor, which is published by
the Jamestown Foundation, a non-profit organization specializing in
research and analysis on conflict and instability in Eurasia.]
Copyright 2004 Asia Times Online Ltd. All rights reserved.
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