SPEAKING
FREELY Iran muscles in on
Azerbaijan By Robert M Cutler
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MONTREAL - The
debate over Iran and its relations with the
international community has taken on such a
character that egregious errors of fact and logic
cannot be allowed to stand, especially when they
concern relations with smaller neighboring
countries such as Azerbaijan.
Polemics
from Tehran against Baku reflect the fact that
Iran's anti-Azerbaijan policy is driven by three
motives. It is worthwhile to enumerate them after
the briefest recall of the situation on the
ground.
Wars between Russia and Persia in
the early 19th century ended
the rule of local khans
and established the present border between
Azerbaijan and Iran, as the former was made part
of the Russian Empire (and later Soviet Union)
while "southern Azerbaijan" became part of the
Persian Empire. Since 1991, the independent
Republic of Azerbaijan has emerged as an
autonomous player in Caspian Sea and world energy
markets with significant offshore deposits of oil
and gas.
With a population just over 9
million scattered over an area of 86,600 square
kilometers (approximately the size of Portugal),
including Nagorno-Karabakh, the 20% of
Azerbaijan's land surface occupied by Armenia
since the 1994 ceasefire in the Nagorno-Karabakh
War, Azerbaijan's energy resources and
geopolitical location have given it over the past
two decades an international profile far higher
than could otherwise be expected.
The
three motives that drive Iran's anti-Azerbaijan
policy are:
First, Azerbaijan's
independence attracts the attention of the ethnic
Azeri minority in Iran. [1] Second, Iran cannot
stomach Azerbaijan's relations with the West in
matters of security and energy. Third, the
secularism of the Azerbaijani model gives the lie
to the millenarian pretensions of the Tehran
regime. Let me address these matters in sequence.
First, Azerbaijan's independence attracts
the attention of the ethnic Azeri minority in
Iran, which comprises over a quarter and possibly
as much as a third of Iran's population. Like
other ethnic minorities in Iran (which together
comprise half the country's population), ethnic
Azeris are denied the right to educate their
children in their national language and to use it
in interaction with state institutions such as
during judicial proceedings or in written
bureaucratic forms. [2]
In the early
1990s, the then Azerbaijani president Abulfaz
Elchibey made a few statements about "southern
Azerbaijan" (ie, ethnic Azeri locales in northwest
Iran) upon which Iranian commentators have drawn
ever since, in order to seek to justify Tehran's
support for "Christian" Armenia over "Muslim"
Azerbaijan in the Nagorno-Karabakh War.
However, Elchibey left the presidency in
Baku nearly two decades ago and no subsequent
leader has ever repeated his views. Indeed, as
demonstrated by the facts documented below,
Azerbaijani state policy has respected the
integrity of the Iranian state rather more
scrupulously than Iran has respected Azerbaijan's.
Second, Iran cannot stomach Azerbaijan's
relationship with the West in matters of security
and energy. But it is Iran that has been
threatening Azerbaijan for over a decade rather
than vice versa as some commentators have it.
Thus, in the summer of 2001, the
deployment of military force by Iran in the
Caspian Sea and the threat of its use compelled a
BP-led exploration mission including an
Azerbaijani vessel to cease its work on the
offshore Alov hydrocarbon deposit. [3]
Moreover, Iran has for years already been
seeking not only by words but by deeds to
destabilize the legitimate government of
Azerbaijan. A few examples demonstrate the point.
Fifteen Iranians and Azerbaijanis were convicted
in Azerbaijan in 2007 for spying on US, British,
and Israeli interests, including oil facilities,
and conspiring to overthrow the government. In
2008, Azerbaijani authorities exposed and thwarted
a plot by Hezbollah operatives with Iranian
assistance to blow up the Israeli Embassy in Baku.
[4]
Four months ago, the Azerbaijani
journalist Rafiq Tagi was murdered in Baku for
publishing an article critical of Iran, likely by
an Iranian agent or pro-Iranian elements in Baku.
[5] And in December 2011, three Azerbaijani men
were detained after planning to attack two
Israelis employed by a Jewish school in Baku. [6]
Against this background, warnings, for
example, that Iran "could ... engag[e] in
counter-covert operation activities" in Azerbaijan
and that "Tehran will take it to the next level
and most likely take action inside Azerbaijan"
represent admissions of responsibility for what
has already been occurring. (See, Tehran
takes issue with Azerbaijan, Asia Times
Online, February 15, 2012). This would be risible
if the events themselves were not so tragic in
their consequences.
Third, the secularism
of the Azerbaijani model gives the lie to the
millenarian pretensions of the Tehran regime, this
being all the more dangerous to the theocrats
since Azerbaijan has a predominantly a Shi'ite
population. Hypocritical to its own religious
declarations, Iran has favored "Christian" Armenia
over "Muslim" Azerbaijan from the start of the
conflict between the two South Caucasus countries.
The Tehran regime's advocacy of Islamic
and Muslim unity is revealed as a thin tissue
seeking to obscure the assertion and pursuit of
Iran's own national interests as conceived by its
ruling elite ("mullahklatura"), just as Moscow's
advocacy of international proletarian unity was
during the Cold War a cover for asserting and
pursing Russia's national interests, as conceived
by the Soviet ruling elite ("nomenklatura").
Iran's support for Armenia has come in
more than words. To indicate but a few deeds: Iran
opened a crucial gas pipeline to Armenia in 2007
providing an energy lifeline, is constructing two
hydroelectric plants on the Araks River that marks
their common border, and has built a highway and
railroad between the two countries. [7]
Armenia has reciprocated Iran's attention.
According to a US State Department cable released
by WikiLeaks, Armenia has facilitated the purchase
by Iran of rockets and machine guns later used to
kill American troops in Iraq. [8] In March 2011,
Armenia's President Serzh Sargsyan accepted the
invitation of Iran's President Mahmud Ahmadinejad
to celebrate Novruz (Persian New Year) in Tehran,
where the leader from Yerevan, the Armenian
capital, underlined that the Iranian government
"has placed no limits on the development of
cooperation with Yerevan". [9]
With
Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan's
descent into anti-Israeli demagoguery to compete
with Iran in Arab public opinion and distract the
Turkish electorate from his government's faltering
economic performance, Azerbaijan today represents
the institutionalized historical memory of the
2,400-year coexistence of Turkic Muslims with
Jews.
The well-known epitome of this
relationship in modern history is the Ottoman
Sultan Beyazid II's formal invitation to Jews
expelled from Spain and Portugal in 1492 to take
up residence in Turkey.
That being so, the
ruling elite in Tehran view the very existence of
Azerbaijan as giving the lie to their own
pretensions about the immutability of conflict
between Jews and Muslims in general. They thus
seek to remove that existence.
As far back
as 1999, for example, in reference to the Gabala
radar station in Azerbaijan, the chairman of the
joint chiefs of staff of the Iranian armed forces
Hassan Firouzabadi threatened the Baku government
by pointing to the presence of "Shiite Azeris with
Iranian blood in their veins" in the region where
the base might be established. [10]
Firouzabadi has continued in this manner
for over a dozen years. Just last August, he
personally threatened the Azerbaijani President
Ilham Aliev with a "dark future" if he did not
"pay heed" and cease "to bar Islamic rules". [11]
But can Iran's aggressive words and deeds
be at all justified? Is Azerbaijan actually
hostile to Iran? The facts say no. Azerbaijan has
supported Iran's right for peaceful nuclear
program. [12] In January 2011, it signed a
five-year agreement to supply least one billion
cubic meters of natural gas annually to Iran. [13]
Most notably, Azerbaijan has pledged that its
territory would not be used for military purposes
against Iran. [14]
Yet we read in Asia
Times Online (see above reference) that Baku
should "prepare for the worst consequences if its
territory or air space [is] used for strikes
against Iran", because it "has entered into a
Faustian bargain that may well backfire".
The author of that article explicitly
mentions the failed car bomb in New Delhi and an
incident in Tbilisi in order to assert that they
"serve as a warning sign that [Baku] could be
witness to similar, if not worse, troubles
threatening [Azerbaijan's] peace and tranquility
if it continues to favor Iran's adversaries".
Still more striking, he writes: "Tehran's
ruling elite may resort to offensive measures
inside[!!] Azerbaijan, ... scaring energy
investors, and thus introducing economic
hardship"; and again, Iran "retaliat[es by] ...
sowing the seeds of instability in the South
Caucasus-South Caspian region"; and again, "Tehran
will take it to the next level and most likely
take action inside [the first "inside" was not a
mistake!] Azerbaijan."
Further facts could
be adduced to demonstrate how Baku, not Tehran,
has the right to be the aggrieved party between
the two; however, there are limits to the patience
that an author is entitled to expect of a reader.
Nevertheless, the facts already presented here
must surely make clear the perils of "reportage"
that only recites the views of one power in the
region, while trusting that readers far away lack
in-depth knowledge of it.
Such a
commentary as the one cited here, when it is
brought up against real and indisputable (and
documented) facts on the ground, is revealed as a
compendium of such shamelessly open threats as
have long characterized the Tehran regime, threats
that, when publicized in certain ways, may in turn
represent a signal for a terrorist mobilization by
agents already in place.
In that context,
it is worth noting that as recently as late
February, members of a terrorist cell created by
the Iranian Revolutionary Guards (Sepah) and the
Lebanese Hezbollah were arrested in Azerbaijan.
[15]
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