by Guy Chazan
As Azerbaijan steps out of the post-Soviet Commonwealth of Independent States, its leaders are making their grand debut on the world stage and relishing the new-found limelight.
Since Abulfaz Elchibey became President of the Caspian state in June, he has done much to give his country the international standing it lacked when it was just another former Soviet republic wracked by internal strife and ethnic conflict. "Elchibey's greatest achievement has been in foreign policy-breaking through the international blockade," says former Presidential Press Secretary Niyazi Ibragimov.
Ibragimov, a spokesman for the Azerbaijani Popular Front of which Elchibey is still leader, cites recent deals with international oil companies like Amoco and British Petroleum to develop extensive offshore oil fields in the Caspian Sea as proof of the new Azeri leaders' desire to win new friends in the world.
He also points to recent visits by former U.K. Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher and British Trade Minister Michael Heseltine, who led a delegation representing Britain's leading industrial firms, as evidence of Azerbaijan's new-found respectability.
Observers see progress on the oil deals as a direct result of last June's power change. "You have to attribute the breakthrough in negotiations to the Popular Front," says one Western diplomat.
The former President Ayaz Mutalibov who resigned last March, was regarded by most Azeris as a Kremlin lackey, his ministers as mafiosi stripping the country's assets. The new Popular Front government is seen by many as a fresh start, an attempt to break with an ignoble past. "The old regime was linked with Communist imperialist forces in Moscow and corrupt forces in Azerbaijan," says Parliament speaker Isa Gambarov. "Now all these ties are broken."
Niyazi Ibragimov says the country's new leaders have done much to shatter some of the stereotypes that dominated thinking about Azerbaijan in the West. "We were in an information blockade for ages," he says. "The world community thought we were anti-Armenian, Islamic fundamentalists...We couldn't convince the world we wanted democracy."
By taking its place in international organizations such as the United Nations, and joining financial institutions like the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank, Azerbaijan has overnight become a figure on the world stage. And its participation in the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe has done much to internationalize the Karabagh conflict, prompting mediation efforts by other European countries in an effort to stop the four-year war in the region.
"We now have a balanced foreign policy," says Isa Gambarov. "Unlike in the past we have normal relations with Russia, Turkey and other Western countries and we are trying to forge better relations with Iran. Only four months in power, the President has achieved a great deal."
As Azerbaijan moves towards the West, its relations with its first new friend of the post-Communist era and ethnic big brother Turkey, are being scaled down. "For a long time, Turkey was our only bridge to the West," says Ibragimov. "It was the nearest example of the Western economic and political model we had on hand. These days Turkey is losing this priority. Azerbaijan now wants more direct relations with Western countries, without a mediator."
Observers sense irritation with the activities of Turkish salesmen swarming to the Azeri capital Baku to trade low-quality Turkish goods for Azerbaijan's valuable raw materials. 'They are getting pretty sick of carpet-baggers from Turkey selling boxes of chewing gum for a ton of cotton," says one Western diplomat.
As the Turko-Azeri friendship cools, relations between Baku and Tehran correspondingly improve. This is surprising in the light of Elchibey's fiercely anti-Iranian rhetoric on the campaign trial last spring. Tehran was harangued for its treatment of 20 million ethnic Azeris in northern Iran. But recently the two governments agreed to build a 65-km railway through Iranian territory linking Azerbaijan with its enclave Nakhichevan, wedged between Armenia and Iran. Tehran has also agreed to deliver gas, coal and wheat to the blockaded enclave.
Iranian-Azeri rapprochement is being seen as an attempt by Iran to avert confrontation over the fate of its Azeri minority, and to challenge Tehran's traditional rival Turkey in its own ethnic sphere of influence. The attempt appears to be working.
However, Turkey still dominates the political landscape in the Transcaucasian region and Central Asia. This preeminent role was reaffirmed at the end of October when Ankara hosted a summit of leaders from all five Turkic-speaking former Soviet republics, Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Kirgizstan and Turkmenistan.
The summit confirmed the indissoluble ties linking these states and laid the groundwork for closer economic cooperation between them, including plans to transport Kazakh and Turkmen oil and gas to Europe across Turkey.
Azerbaijan is spreading its network of foreign partners. A Chinese-Azeri joint venture has been set up at one radioelectronics enterprise to turn out television sets: and the French are building a factory in Baku to create microchip components.
Other Western companies are expressing a willingness to cooperate, as once closed defense factories working for the Soviet military machine now switch to civilian production, capitalizing on a workforce skilled in electronics manufacture and machine building.
But there are still underlying tensions jeopardizing Azerbaijan's new policy of openness. Some Azeris fear Western exploitation of their natural resources: and anti-Western feeling has been aroused in some quarters by American policy towards Karabagh.
The Freedom Support Act recently passed by Congress, which provides technical, economic and humanitarian aid to the former Soviet republics, contains a clause ruling out such aid for Azerbaijan until it fulfills certain conditions, a prohibition that caused fury in Azeri ruling circles. The clause withholds aid "until the government of Azerbaijan takes demonstrable steps to cease all blockades and other offensive uses of force against Armenia and Nagorno-Karabagh." But the Azeris deny they are blockading Armenia and claim the war is purely defensive.
If the frantic diplomatic efforts to modify the prohibition clause fail, charities like CARE which is distributing 540 tons of food and medicine from the U.S. as part of a state program of humanitarian aid will be forced to quit Baku as soon as the Act goes into effect. Isa Gambarov warns of the dangers inherent in the aid ban, which could arouse anti-American passions in the Transcaucasian state.
"In the West people are beginning to think there is no need to help Azerbaijan," Gambarov says. "But in Azerbaijan the idea is forming that the West is not helping us. I do not want anti-Western feeling in Azerbaijan."
Whatever the fortunes of Baku's relationship with the West, one thing is certain: Azerbaijan has had it with the Commonwealth of Independent States. On Oct. 7 the Mili Mejlis or Parliament voted against joining the C.I.S. by an overwhelming majority.
"What kind of organization is it? It doesn't even have a charter," says deputy Prime Minister Vahid Akhmedov. "What does it need? What does it want? It has no future. The states are independent now, and they all want to decide things by themselves."
For some in Azerbaijan the C.I.S. represents one thing only: an attempt by Communists and imperialists to resurrect the Soviet Union, with all its economic, political and military structures.
"(C.I.S. Defense Minister Yevgeny) Shaposhnikov and his generals are just trying to recreate the Soviet army," says Gen. Fahmin Gadzhiev, head of Azerbaijan's Interior Ministry forces. "But Azerbaijan would rather join N.A.T.O. than the C.I.S."
A realignment is going on, and Azerbaijan is surrounded by anxious suitors striving to court her favor. With plenty of strategic resources in a volatile area, the small Caspian republic looks set to play a larger-than-life role on the grand stage of Central Asia.
