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, friendship and
brotherhood" as a deceptive statement made by the leader
of an unfriendly country.
The tensions and
mistrust on both sides are important 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 incorporated 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 temporarily 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 supporter 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 relationship 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
Nakhchivan region from the rest of Azerbaijan. Moreover,
the Soviet authorities periodically chipped away at
Azeri territory, diminishing 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 Shi'ism in the country
and Azeris proved to be the most ardent exponents
of Iranian Shi'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 Shi'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 disproportionate 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 important 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, supporting 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 support 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 support 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 export 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 port 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 opportunity 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 support 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 support 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.
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