by Ana Radelat
Ana Radelat is a journalist working in Washington D.C.
President Haidar Aliyev's warm reception at the White House and other places where the powerful gathered in his honor made it clear that the United States has intensified its efforts to make a good friend out of Azerbaijan. For his part, Aliyev went out of his way to display his willingness to cozy up to the United States before his U.S. tour of Washington and other major American cities in August, boasting that "Azerbaijan is a long-term partner for the United States."
To back up his rhetoric, Aliyev has done a few things since his election four years ago to make Washington happy, including the cancellation of Iran's five percent share in a $7.4 billion Caspian oil project. The rebuff to Iran, which occurred a couple of years ago, resulted in Tehran's decision to close its borders to Azerbaijan and set off a series of other frictions between the two neighbors. But to Aliyev, a fallout with Iran is less important to his other goal: making Azerbaijan a strategic partner of the United States.
Ironically, Aliyev's overtures to the United States may be less important to his goal of fostering good relations with the United States than the fact that his small Central Asian nation controls vast petroleum reserves.
The Clinton administration is aware that these offshore reserves in the Caspian Sea, worth an estimated $2 to $4 trillion, could wean the United States of its dependence on potentially unstable Persian Gulf supplies. The fact that well-connected power brokers, such as former Secretary of State James Baker and former National Security advisers Brent Scowkroft and Zbigniew Brzezinski, are lobbying for Azerbaijan on the behalf of large U.S. oil companies is also boosting Aliyev's fortunes in Washington.
Subtle, but substantial, changes in U.S. policy toward Azerbaijan are certain to affect the U.S. view of the tense standoff over Nagorno Karabakh. The only question is: how will the U.S. shift affect negotiations over the future of the ethnic Armenians who live there?
Nagorno Karabakh, an Armenian Christian enclave within Azerbaijan, is a symbol of the region's ethnic and political volatility. Created in 1922 by the Stalinist Soviet Union to suppress various ethnic and religious groups, Nagorno Karabakh exploded in violence after the U.S.S.R. began to disintegrate in 1988. The war was touched off by Nagorno Karabakh's demand for self-rule and it was aided by a newly independent Armenia that sent its troops across the border to help. The results of nearly four years of fighting: the deaths of thousands of Armenians and Azerbaijanis, Karabakh's control of new territory and the displacement of about 800,000 Azerbaijanis. Human rights observers reported that massacres of civilians were committed by both sides. A fragile cease fire between the warring factions, established in 1994, still holds. But the question of Nagorno Karabakh is far from settled.
Lawmakers in Congress, sympathetic to Armenian-American concerns, were successful in their efforts to punish Baku's government with a statute known as Section 907 of the 1992 Freedom Support Act. The law bans all U.S. government aid to Azerbaijan and was meant to counter Azerbaijan's blockade against Armenia. The Clinton administration opposed Section 907 from the start but took little action to eliminate the sanction. But that is changing now.
President Clinton's point man in the Caucasus, Deputy Secretary of State Strobe Talbot, has made an issue of Section 907, calling it an obstacle to U.S. efforts to find a lasting solution to Nagorno Karabakh's situation. "It has had the negative effect of limiting our leverage with Baku and complicating our ability to be as effective as we could otherwise be as an honest broker, " he says.
A State Department official responsible for the Caucasus policy said U.S. inability to provide aid to Azerbaijan, even direct humanitarian aid, hurts U.S. attempt at democracy building. Armenia, however, received $60 million in U.S. assistance last year, making it the second highest country in the world, after Israel, in per capita U.S. aid. Azerbaijan chafes at the unequal treatment and at the fact that Section 907 shuts it out from receiving U.S. development funds and loan guarantees it needs to exploit its oil reserves. Aliyev's complaint to Clinton about Section 907 during his White House meeting with the president is likely to fuel Talbott's campaign against the sanction.
A State Department official who works with Talbott on the issue said he's hopeful the administration can weaken congressional resistance to the elimination of Section 907. "There's a greater understanding of what's going on over there now," he says. "In 1992, lawmakers couldn't find Azerbaijan on the map."
Talbott is one of the three co-chairs on the Minsk Group, an international body within the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE), that has been trying to find a more permanent solution to the Nagorno Karabakh conflict. The United States and Russia recently became co-chairs of the Minsk Group, joining France, and this development signals that Moscow and Washington may be trying to balance their roles of competitors in the region for those of collaborators.
Talbott said great power competition in the region "fueled and lubricated by oil" must be a thing of the past. "Let's make sure that we're thinking in terms appropriate to the 21st century and not to the 19th," he said. But he used a 19th century description of the region, calling it a "Silk Road" to worldwide commerce.
Talbott and his Russian and French co-chairs traveled to Baku, Yerevan and Stepanakert, the capital of Nagorno Karabakh, in May with proposals they hoped would resolve, once and for all, the conflict over Nagorno Karabakh. The proposals were kept secret, but some details of the plan have leaked.
The great powers suggested this: that Karabakh receive autonomous status within Azerbaijan with its own constitution and its security guaranteed by the international community. The enclave would also become an economic free-zone. In return, Nagorno Karabakh would return to its neighbor all the land it seized during the war.
The proposal stops short of giving Nagorno Karabakh what is wants: total secession from Azerbaijan. Aliyev has objected to anything except "broad autonomy" for the enclave.
Despite the seemingly irreparable differences between Baku and Stepanakert, a U.S. State Department negotiator says he's optimistic the time is ripe for a solution to the conflict because Russia, the United States and Europe are working as one. "One of the problems before is that there was a lot of competition, now there's a sense that there's a unified position," he said.
Russia's new cooperation on the matter is a key factor in giving negotiations new life, the official said. "Earlier it was very difficult to know whether the Russians were serious about solving this." The U.S. official says Russia's new attitude has evolved from lessons learned from its Chechen defeat, a "healthier Boris Yeltsin" and "a growing realization in Moscow that stability and economic development (in the Caucasus) is better."
He refuses to say whether the great power peace plan included a provision for a future binding referendum for the people of Nagorno Karabakh that would allow them to vote on their independence. The official portrays the Minsk group's role as that of a catalyst to persuade the warring parties to develop their own solution to the problem. He calls the proposals mere blueprints that can be used to kick off a negotiating process. "We want to provide as good offices as possible to get them as far as we can."
While the United States says the Caucasus' strategic geographical position has given the region added importance, the State Department official admits, that "oil, of course, is also a factor" in the increase of U.S. interest in the region.
Aliyev's controversial visit to Washington and other American cities was made possible with the help of large U.S. oil companies. Big Oil's efforts were quickly repaid.
At a meeting with Vice President Al Gore, Aliyev signed agreements with representatives from Chevron, Exxon and Mobil that allows U.S. companies to drill hundreds of square miles of the Caspian, while Amoco secured the rights to negotiate for another field that potentially holds two billion barrels of oil. Outside the White House fence, a group of Armenian-Americans protested the red carpet treatment Aliyev received from the Clinton administration.
Besides protesting every public appearance by the Azerbaijan leader in the United States, Armenian-Americans flooded the White House with 150,000 postcards that accuse Aliyev, a former Soviet Politburo member, of crushing political opposition, censoring the news media and relying on threats of force to keep himself in power. No "blood-for-oil" was the protesters' rallying cry.
John Lichtblau, chairman of the Petroleum Industry Research Foundation in New York, worries about the influence Armenian-Americans have on U.S. politics. He says the community may, in the end, thwart oil company attempts to eliminate Section 907 -- a sanction, he maintains, that blunts the competitive edge of U.S. oil companies in the region. "American companies are at a disadvantage," Lichtblau says. " Other countries don't have hostile legislation against Azerbaijan."
Lichtblau says U.S. oil companies have taken up Azerbaijan's cause in the fight over Section 907 because they want to give the Clinton administration the best chance to find a lasting solution to the conflict over Nagorno Karabakh. Stability in the region is important to safeguard U.S. investments in the Caspian Sea, Lichtblau says. "We don't want to build pipelines that may be endangered by war."
A challenge to Section 907 is pending in the Senate version of the Foreign Operations bill that is expected to be considered in Congress after lawmakers return to Washington in September from their summer break. It would allow Azerbaijan to seek development loans from the federal Export-Import Bank and permit humanitarian aid to flow directly to the Baku government.
A group of House lawmakers sympathetic to Armenian causes, however, led by Reps. John Porter, R. - Ill., and Frank Pallone, D. N.J., managed to include a competing provision in the House version of the Foreign Operations bill. The House bill bans Export-Import Bank assistance to Azerbaijan and direct humanitarian aid and the warring provisions will ultimately be resolved in House-Senate negotiations over the bill.
Rep. Peter King, R-N.Y., also challenged Section 907 with a bill that would allow U.S. humanitarian aid to Azerbaijan. "This is not meant to be seen as anti-Armenian," King's press secretary Dan Michaelis says. "In order for the United States to play the hand of honest broker in the region it needs to be evenhanded."
But Porter, the Republican leader of the House's so-called Armenian Caucus, does not view Section 907 as an unfair sanction against Azerbaijan or an obstacle to a lasting settlement in the region. To Porter, Section 907 means nothing less than the difference between war and peace.
Porter believes that abolition of the sanction would dramatically hurt Armenia's bargaining power and put the new republic in a "very difficult position." As it stands, Porter says, Armenia has been able to keep the fragile cease fire in place by the strength it achieved through winning the war with Azerbaijan, Nagorno Karabakh capturing 15 to 20 percent of its neighbor's land and pressuring Baku's government with the U.S. sanction. Absent Section 907, Porter says, there is no way to force Azerbaijan to negotiate directly with Nagorno Karabakh, a step toward a potential compromise that Baku refuses to take.
Porter also says that an Armenia and Nagorno Karabakh weakened by the elimination of the U.S. sanction, may decide to resume hostilities before Azerbaijan accelerates its militarization with the use of U.S. economic development funds. "It may be a signal that touches off new desperation in Armenia and Nagorno Karabakh. If Section 907 is gone before a lasting settlement is reached, what chance will Armenia or Nagorno Karabakh have of any security in the future?"
Porter is alarmed that the Clinton administration has "stuck its thumb on the scale and weighted it way over on the Azerbaijan side." His frustration is heightened by his perception that there could be a "win-win-win" situation in the region. The Illinois lawmaker says the United States should stop wooing Azerbaijan and continue to pressure it toward a solution that would allow Nagorno Karabakh to become an independent free trade zone and also American oil companies to build pipelines carrying Azeri oil through Armenia and Turkey to the Black Sea. "That way everyone is a winner," Porter says.
