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BAKU: Turkish-Armenian Soccer Diplomacy: A Direct Hit At Azerbaijan'

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  • BAKU: Turkish-Armenian Soccer Diplomacy: A Direct Hit At Azerbaijan'

    TURKISH-ARMENIAN SOCCER DIPLOMACY: A DIRECT HIT AT AZERBAIJAN'S FOREIGN POLICY ARCHITECTURE
    Elnur Soltanov

    Today
    http://www.today.az/news/politics/ 57107.html
    Nov 2 2009
    Azerbaijan

    Azerbaijan is not happy with the two protocols signed between Armenia
    and Turkey on the 10th of October in Zurich, Switzerland. The most
    common explanation has been that despite all the verbal promises by
    its strategic ally, Baku is not sure that the opening of the borders
    will be tied to the partial withdrawal of Armenian armed forces from
    the territories in and (especially) around Nagorno-Karabakh. But the
    level of disappointment in Azerbaijan cannot be fully explained away
    by an unfavorable behavior of the brotherly government.

    For Azerbaijan, the Turkish border initiative amounts to more than
    that. Namely, it is poised to destroy the foreign policy architecture
    Azerbaijan has been meticulously building since the mid-1990s around
    Karabakh issue, leaving behind uncertainty and confusion. This is
    what makes the repercussions of the Turkish-Armenian conciliation so
    unbearable for Azerbaijan.

    After military defeats in and around Nagorno-Karabakh between 1992 and
    1994 and the concomitant cease-fire freezing the situation lopsidedly
    in Armenia's favor, in the spring of 1994, Azerbaijan started to
    pursue a new foreign policy strategy. It may have begun by default,
    yet by the mid-2000s it has evolved into a clearly, if unofficially,
    defined foreign policy doctrine. The nature of the strategy was simple,
    invoking the memories of the Cold War. It was to be built on Armenia's
    economic isolation and strategic marginalization. The situation was
    Armenia's choice to an extent, but Azerbaijan was intent on fully
    capitalizing on the trend.

    Armenia was to be left out of the regional energy and transport
    projects and deprived of the benefits of the burgeoning Turkish
    economy. This also meant closer relations with Russia and Iran,
    outsiders in the Western-dominated global politics. Azerbaijan,
    on the other hand, revitalizing its economy, becoming a significant
    link in the Western energy security, and increasing the power of its
    military, was to eventually make Armenia more willing to concede on the
    negotiating table its enormous gains obtained in the battlefield. The
    vision and the resources (which, essentially, were hydrocarbons)
    behind the project were coming from Azerbaijan, which also had a
    significant degree of control over it.

    Until recently, the strategy was paying off to the apprehension
    of the Armenian and the satisfaction of the Azerbaijani side. The
    enormously expensive and rewarding Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan oil pipeline
    and Baku-Tbilisi-Erzurum natural gas pipeline have already been
    successfully completed by 2006. The third main transport link,
    Baku-Tbilisi-Kars railroad was slated to be finished by 2011/2012.

    When Armenians helped to freeze the international investment flow into
    the latest project pointing to the intentional isolation of Armenia,
    Azerbaijan, in one of the best indications of its willingness to
    spearhead and finance the strategic trend, opened up its treasury
    generously offering $220 million to Georgia to be paid back in 25
    years with a symbolic interest rate of 1 percent.

    The dynamism that the pipelines and hydrocarbon revenues have been
    generating has had an economic and geopolitical multiplier effect along
    the Azerbaijan-Georgia-Turkey axis, of which Armenia was not a part.

    Armenian economy was definitely lagging behind with an associated
    demographic downturn. According to CIA Country Report, Azerbaijan's
    economy grew twice as fast as the Armenian economy between 2006 and
    2008. Its GDP per capita, almost even with that of Armenia a couple
    of years ago, was 30 percent more than Armenia's $6,300 by 2008.

    Azerbaijan's arms purchases, steadily increasing since the early
    2000s was starting to offset Armenian military arsenal, seasonally
    flooded by Russia's huge military transfers. In fact, the military
    budget of Azerbaijan could be effectively catching up with the entire
    state budget of the Republic of Armenia for 2009.

    Partly as a result of continuing economic difficulties and overall
    insecurities, Armenia's population size has been stuck around 3
    million, while Azerbaijan has grown by a million since 1994 to over
    8 million. According to the International Monetary Fund's forecasts
    these trends are to continue for at least the next five years. The
    hard economic blows of the Russian-Georgian war and the global economic
    downturn of 2008 were the latest indications of how fragile Armenia's
    situation was compared to that of Azerbaijan.

    It is difficult to say how much longer it would have taken for Armenia
    (if ever) to be more willing to make concessions. The pace was slow
    but the strategy and vision of the Azerbaijani political establishment
    was clearly defined and things were, it seemed, moving in the right
    direction. It is here that the deep disappointment on the part of
    the Azerbaijani government lies.

    The Turkish move, and there are many reasons to believe that the
    initiative came from Turkey, removed the most fundamental pillar out of
    the Azerbaijan's foreign policy architecture. True, the architecture
    was being designed by Azerbaijani vision and built by Azerbaijan's
    relatively rich energy resources. But the fundamental pillar necessary
    for the success of the isolation project was Turkey's willingness to
    cooperate in keeping Armenia at bay.

    For Azerbaijan the timing of the Turkish initiative makes it especially
    worrisome. It began after Azerbaijan's resource-led projects and
    investments have already been made. One does not change the direction
    of the multibillion pipelines and railroads overnight.

    In the same context, it is only with the completion of the pipelines
    in 2006 that a true economic gap started to emerge between Azerbaijan
    and Armenia with real security implications. As soon as Azerbaijan's
    foreign policy architecture started to show real signs of success
    Turkey defected.

    Of course, there could be positive implications to the Turkish-Armenian
    conciliation for Azerbaijan, yet it is undefined, unofficial and is as
    possible as the opposite result. Despite the Justice and Development
    Party, or AKP, government's verbal promises, Karabakh is not built
    into the border initiative which has been internationalized and
    already slipping off of Turkey's control.

    What could be gone are not only the clarity of the tools and the
    purpose of Azerbaijan's foreign policy strategy around Karabakh,
    but also the relative control Baku had over the overall process
    targeting the resolution of the conflict. With the signatures in
    Zurich, the future of the occupied lands of Azerbaijan is a function
    of the overly internationalized Turkish-Armenian relations. Azerbaijan
    has lost the initiative.

    >From the Azerbaijani perspective, its clear, controllable, working
    and priority strategy has been replaced by an unclear, uncontrollable
    and an untested alternative. The status quo around Karabakh, which
    is unfavorable to Azerbaijan, is no longer the driving force of
    the regional political configurations; it has become an appendix to
    the internationalized Turkish-Armenian relations. And Turkey, the
    international community and Armenia, in dwindling the order down to
    zero, are less concerned about Azerbaijani preferences in the zone
    of conflict.

    One cannot help but remember that Turkey felt betrayed when the United
    States decided to withdraw its Jupiter medium-range nuclear missiles
    from Turkish soil to resolve its differences with the Soviet Union
    after the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962. The current situation between
    Azerbaijan and Turkey is not exactly analogous to the aforementioned.

    The latter is only a worse case from the Azerbaijani viewpoint.

    In the Jupiter crisis the strategy and resources belonged to a more
    powerful ally and Turkey was only trying to beef up its overall
    strategic position bandwagoning with the overwhelming global American
    initiative. But in the case of Turkey and Azerbaijan, a unilateral move
    by a more powerful ally is perceived as wasting Azerbaijan's resources,
    Azerbaijan's strategy and Azerbaijan's initiative. It would not be an
    exaggeration to say that this strategy was shaping the very identity of
    the Azeri foreign policy. One of the biggest and overlooked challenges
    of the Turkish-Armenian protocols will be dealing with the destruction
    of this foreign policy architecture and identity, and the uncertainty,
    confusion and the lack of direction it leaves behind.
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