Iran, Azerbaijan seem destined for more tension
By Mahan Abedin

Special to The Daily Star
Wednesday, September 01, 2004

The visit of Iranian President Mohammad Khatami to the former Soviet
republic of Azerbaijan in early August raised hopes both in Tehran and
Baku for an improvement in relations between the two countries. It was
hoped that the visit would ease bilateral tensions, since Tehran has
viewed Azerbaijan with increasing suspicion since the latter gained
independence in 1991.

Khatami’s three-day trip started well after he met with his Azeri
counterpart Ilham Aliyev. In a deceptive and grandiose statement so
typical of high officials in the Islamic Republic, Khatami declared:
“The border between the Islamic Republic of Iran and the Republic of
Azerbaijan is a border of peace, friendship and brotherhood.” However
this could not mask the continued strained relations between Iran
and Azerbaijan, which may be the basis for a major conflict in the
southern Caucasus in the medium to long term.

The rapid break-up of the Soviet Union in the fall of 1991 raised
alarm bells in Tehran. Although Iran was 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 worry
was that an independent Azerbaijan would be a magnet for Iran’s
7-million-strong Azeri minority.

However these worries proved to be unfounded. Iran’s Azeris are well
integrated into Iranian society and punch well above their demographic
weight – ethnic Azeris have dominated the political and military
elites in Iran since the beginning of the 19th century. Even today,
Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, is an ethnic Azeri. The
same applies to the commander of Iran’s elite Revolutionary Guards,
Ali Safavi. Moreover, most Iranian Azeris live in Tehran rather than
in Iranian-Azerbaijan in the northwest of the country. This has
tended to dilute the Azeris’ cultural idiosyncrasies, despite the
fact that many continue to cherish their own language. Furthermore,
Iran’s Azeri population is markedly different than Azeris in the former
Soviet republic in terms of political consciousness, socio-economic
structures and popular culture – not least because the two peoples
have been separated for more than 150 years.

The upshot is that Iran’s Azeri minority is in every way unreceptive
to the irredentist slogans of pan-Turks and Azeri nationalists in
the republic of Azerbaijan. However this has not stopped pan-Turks
and other political agitators from trying to sow dissent across the
border. The election of Abulfaz Elchibey to the Azerbaijan presidency
in June 1992 proved disastrous for Iranian-Azeri relations. Elchibey
campaigned on a platform of moving Azerbaijan closer to Turkey,
America and Israel, arousing suspicion in Tehran. However it was
Elchibey’s political irresponsibility that most irked Iran’s political
and security elites. Elchibey openly called for Iranian Azeris to
struggle for their independence. A combination of ineptitude and
arrogance finally forced him to flee his capital a little more than
a year after assuming office.

Elchibey’s posturing against Iran and his suppression of pro-Iranian
political forces in Azerbaijan resulted in the Iranians’ tacitly
backing Armenia in the war over Nagorno-Karabakh. This produced an odd
geopolitical landscape, with ultra-secular Turkey, a member of NATO
and a reliable ally of the United States, supporting Muslim Azerbaijan;
and Iran, an Islamic state with a passionately anti-American ideology,
backing pro-Western and Christian Armenia.

Iran’s backing of Armenia was far-reaching. This support destroyed the
myth that Iran had developed an exclusively “Islamic” foreign policy
after the 1979 revolution. For the first time since the revolution,
Iranian political elites accepted that when Iranian national interests
were at stake, Islamic sensibilities would not be accorded top
priority. Moreover, in the conflict over Nagorno-Karabakh, Iran’s
support for the Armenians helped them score an overwhelming military.

The rise of Haydar Aliyev, following the overthrow of Elchibey, did
not significantly ease tensions with Iran. A former high-ranking KGB
official and first secretary of the Communist Party of Azerbaijan,
Aliyev was an experienced and shrewd politician. However,
his authoritarian and ultra-secular instincts brought him into
conflict with Iran. Aliyev cracked down on pro-Iranian parties and
attributed any form of Islamic revival in the republic to Iranian
interference. The newly reconstituted Azeri security services regularly
rounded up pro-Iranian political activists on charges of “spying”
for the Islamic Republic.

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For its part Iran stepped up covert and intelligence activities in
Azerbaijan, and from early 1995 onward dedicated an entire department
of its Intelligence Ministry to espionage operations in the former
Soviet republic. As in other parts of the Muslim regions of the former
Soviet Union, the Iranians were much less interested in spreading
militant Islam than in penetrating the political, military, security
and economic institutions of these emergent states.

Another point of Iranian-Azeri contention has been the legal status
of the Caspian Sea and the energy resources contained in it. Iran
insists that relations there 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,” where the “principles of
equality and exclusivity” prevail. However, in March 1998 the Russian
government communicated to the Aliyev regime that Moscow no longer
had any objections to unilateral offshore oil and gas development
by Azerbaijan.

The arrival of Western oil companies in Azerbaijan and the development
of that country’s offshore energy infrastructure were treated with
alarm in Tehran. This was accentuated by Iran’s missing out on a
lucrative deal to act as a transit route for the export of Azeri oil
via the Gulf. The Americans applied intense pressure to persuade all
parties concerned to replace the most convenient and economically
efficient route, through Iran, with an alternative route through
the Turkish port of Ceyhan. 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 a ship belonging to British
Petroleum and forced it to sail away.

The realization that Azerbaijan has possession of considerable stocks
of oil and natural gas has brought the country under tighter American
influence. This relationship has been reinforced since the attacks
of Sept. 11, 2001, and the US-led “war on terrorism.” The Iranians
are fearful that Azerbaijan might allow American forces to strike at
Iran in the event of an Iranian-American military confrontation over
Iran’s alleged nuclear weapons program.

In order to avoid this scenario the Iranians have communicated
to the Azeris in no uncertain terms that, in the event of such
collaboration between Baku and Washington, Tehran would provide
direct and unqualified support to the Armenians in a future war over
Nagorno-Karabakh, thus ensuring the demise of the Azeri republic. These
threats have a chilling resonance in Baku: The Armenians seized more
than 20 percent of Azeri territory in the war of the 1990s.

These complex geopolitical and historical forces mean that Iran and
Azerbaijan are likely to experience tense relations for many years
to come. The Azeri opposition daily Muxalifat got it about right when
it dismissed Khatami’s reference to a border marked by “brotherhood”
as a deceptive statement made by the leader of an unfriendly country.

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. He
wrote this commentary for THE DAILY STAR