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  • Facing Growing Iranian Threats, Azerbaijan Deepens Ties To Israel

    Facing Growing Iranian Threats, Azerbaijan Deepens Ties To Israel

    Wednesday, 15 May 2013

    Published in Analytical Articles
    by Robert M. Cutler (05/15/2013 issue of the CACI Analyst)


    Iranian legislators in Teheran have drafted a bill calling for
    revision of the 1828 Treaty of Turkmanchay, which divided the multiple
    Azerbaijani khanates between the Russian and Persian Empires. While
    this cannot be taken wholly seriously, it is a symbol of the
    deterioration of bilateral relations. It comes against a background of
    worsening rhetoric between Teheran and Baku, which have in the past
    extended into subversive actions by Iran on the territory of
    Azerbaijan. It is thus in the line of longstanding Iranian threats
    against Azerbaijani sovereignty and the government of President Ilham
    Aliyev.

    BACKGROUND: The Safavid dynasty of Persia ruled the territory of
    present-day Azerbaijan during the sixteenth century. In 1603 the
    Ottoman Turks occupied the region, and the victories of Russian Tsar
    Peter the Great in the early 1700s sealed the fall of Safavid
    influence, breaking the territory up into independent and mutually
    quarreling khanates. Following further Russo-Persian wars in the early
    nineteenth century, the 1828 Treaty of Turkmanchay confirmed the
    ceding of the northern khanates to Russia, splitting historical
    Azerbaijan in two. Subsequently, Tsar Nicholas I created the necessary
    condition for the situation now known as the Karabakh problem. With
    the Treaty of Turkmanchay, he styled himself protector of the
    Christians in the Persian Empire, and received them into his own
    lands, settling many ethnic Armenians in what is now Nagorno-Karabakh.

    The legislative bill in the Iranian Majlis is in line with over a
    decade of provocations against Baku and challenges against Azerbaijani
    sovereignty. Perhaps the best known of these took place in the summer
    of 2001, when Iran deployed military force in the Caspian Sea and
    threatened to use it against a BP-led mission intended to explore the
    Alov hydrocarbon deposit in the Azerbaijani sector. This mission
    included an Azerbaijani vessel, and the Iranian threat forced a
    cessation of work that continues to this day. The Iranian name for the
    deposit is Alborz, which perhaps by no coincidence is also the name of
    the country's first deepwater semi-submersible drilling rig, launched
    four years ago in the Caspian Sea.

    More recently, in 2007 fifteen Iranians and Azerbaijanis were
    convicted of spying on state oil facilities and conspiring to
    overthrow the government in Baku. In 2008, a plot by Hezbollah
    operatives to blow up the Israeli Embassy in Baku with Iranian
    assistance was exposed and thwarted. In late 2011 the Azerbaijani
    journalist Rafig Tagi, who had since 2005 been the subject of a
    death-penalty fatwa from Grand Ayatollah Fazel Lankarani, was murdered
    in a knife attack in Baku days after publishing an article that
    criticized Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad for discrediting
    Islam. And in early 2012, Azerbaijani police exposed and arrested
    members of yet another terrorist cell created by the Iranian
    Revolutionary Guards together with the Lebanese Hezbollah.

    IMPLICATIONS: The southern nineteenth-century khanates not absorbed
    into the Russian Empire are referred to as Iranian Azerbaijan, or
    sometimes by northern irredentists as `Southern Azerbaijan.' They now
    constitute four contemporary northwestern Iranian provinces that
    include over 10 percent of the country's population, which is itself
    variously estimated to count between one-quarter and one-third ethnic
    Azerbaijanis. Perhaps in reply to the Majlis initiative seeking
    revision of the Treaty of Turkmenchay, Azerbaijan's foreign minister,
    Elmar Mammadyarov, paid the first-ever high-profile visit by any of
    Baku's cabinet ministers to Israel in late April. There are historic
    and cultural links that undergird the informal upgrading of bilateral
    diplomatic relations. Sephardic Jews have reputedly lived in the
    mountains of Azerbaijan since close to 600 BC, and the region was a
    relatively safe refuge for Ashkenazi Jews fleeing Russia from the
    German invasion during the Second World War. Such a trip was in any
    case overdue in view of the depth and breadth of bilateral relations
    for such a long time.

    Experts estimate that Azerbaijan supplies at least one-third, perhaps
    as much as two-fifths of Israel's oil (roughly 20 million barrels),
    and trade turnover between the two has reached US$ 4 billion per year.
    Azerbaijan is reported to have purchased US$ 1.6 billion in arms from
    Israel in 2012, and Israeli firms are cooperating with the relevant
    Azerbaijani ministries in advising on the Azerbaijani manufacture of
    military weapons. Apart from that, Azerbaijan has for a long time been
    a main link of the Northern Distribution Network, which supplies
    equipment to NATO forces in Afghanistan, and Iran has accused it of
    preparing to allow Israel to conduct military operations against
    Teheran. Hard evidence to support this accusation has been lacking,
    but it is important to note that Azerbaijan's present-day ties with
    Israel are not merely an artifact of state interests. They reflect the
    historical experience of Azerbaijan, where the nation-building
    antecedents even in the nineteenth century were tied to
    anti-clericalism. So it should also not be a surprise that the
    spectrum of Azerbaijani revolutionary parties in the late nineteenth
    and early twentieth centuries replicated the political variety seen in
    Europe and were influenced by European ideologies.

    Tehran's threats against Baku are driven not only by Azerbaijan's
    foreign policy orientation but also by its status as a post-Soviet
    state with a majority Shi'ite population but secular Muslim identity.
    As such, it gives the lie to the Iranian regime's theocratic doctrines
    and eschatological pretensions. Iran pretends to give formal
    diplomatic support for Azerbaijani sovereignty over Nagorno-Karabakh,
    but its sponsorship of actions against Azerbaijani sovereignty as
    mentioned above reveals its real preferences. Indeed, Iran has greatly
    deepened and broadened its relations with Armenia in the last six
    years, opening a crucial gas pipeline to Armenia that has been an
    energy lifeline, constructing two hydroelectric plants on their common
    border, and building highway and railroad links. By contrast,
    relations between Iran and Azerbaijan are already rather poor, and
    there is little that Teheran can do to prevent Baku from deepening its
    relations with Jerusalem. Because there are so many current problems
    and so much mutual distrust, relations between Azerbaijan and Iran are
    unlikely to normalize even after the upcoming presidential elections
    in Iran, regardless of which faction of the Teheran elite is able to
    claim victory.

    CONCLUSIONS: Iran's threats affect not just Azerbaijan but also
    Turkey, since Turkey's current prosperity is due in significant part
    to its low-cost imports of natural gas from Azerbaijan for domestic
    use, as well as its role as a transit country for Azerbaijani oil
    (Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan pipeline) and, soon, gas (Baku-Tbilisi-Erzerum
    and Trans-Anatolian pipelines) to European and world markets. With its
    investment in Turkey's petrochemical sector, Azerbaijan is set to
    become the largest foreign investor in the country before the end of
    the present decade. Although Mammadyarov's visit to Israel was not
    `official', he met with the president, prime minister, defense
    minister and other senior officials in the country for intensive
    discussions. At a news conference after the trip was over he concluded
    that it was only `a matter of time' before Azerbaijan opened an
    embassy in Israel. Official Baku does not credit Teheran's accusations
    against Israel that it is seeking to throw a wrench into
    Azerbaijani-Iranian relations. On the contrary, Azerbaijan is said to
    have refrained from high-level visits to Israel in the past in order
    not to antagonize Iran. Mammadyarov's visit may therefore, in future
    retrospect, be seen as a turning point.

    AUTHOR'S BIO: Dr. Robert M Cutler is senior research fellow in the
    Institute of European, Russian and Eurasian Studies, Carleton
    University, Canada.

    http://www.cacianalyst.org/publications/analytical-articles/item/12730-facing-growing-iranian-ties-azerbaijan-deepens-ties-to-israel.html




    From: A. Papazian
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