Analysis: NATO Cancels Planned Maneuvers In Azerbaijan
By Liz Fuller

RFE/RL

13 September 2004 — NATO’s Cooperative Best Effort-2004 exercises,
scheduled to take place on 14-27 September in Azerbaijan, have been
canceled, according to a NATO press release of 13 September.

“We regret that the principle of inclusiveness could not be upheld
in this case,” the press release stated, without elaborating. But
Lieutenant-Colonel Ludger Terbrueggen, who is a spokesman for NATO
military command, told RFE/RL’s Armenian Service the same day that
“the reason…is that Azerbaijan did not grant visas to soldiers and
officers of Armenia.”

Since January, Baku has sought repeatedly to thwart the
planned Armenian presence at this year’s Cooperative Best Effort
maneuvers. Three Armenian military officers who tried to travel to Baku
in early January first from Turkey and then from Georgia to attend
a planning conference for the maneuvers were prevented from doing
so. In June, members of the radical Karabakh Liberation Organization
(QAT) picketed, and then forced their way into, a Baku hotel where
two Armenian officers were attending a second planning conference
in preparation for the exercises. Five of those QAT activists were
arrested and sentenced in late August to between three and five years’
imprisonment on charges of hooliganism, violating public order, and
obstructing government officials. Those verdicts triggered protests
from across the political spectrum, fueling public opposition to the
Armenians’ anticipated arrival.

In April, Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev assured Deputy Commander
of the U.S. European Command General Charles Wald that there were
no obstacles to the Armenian participation in the September war
games. Other visiting U.S. officials also sought to impress on
Azerbaijan the importance of allowing the Armenian contingent
to attend. But in recent weeks, the Azerbaijani government has
made increasingly clear its hostility to the planned Armenian
participation. On 27 July, the independent ANS TV quoted Deputy
Foreign Minister Araz Azimov as saying that Baku has stipulated that
only noncombat personnel — military journalists, public-relations
officials, and military doctors — would be permitted to attend, and
that the number of Armenian participants would be limited to three. (On
4 September, however, Armenian Deputy Defense Minister Major General
Artur Aghabekian said seven Armenian officers would take part in the
exercises, while the number denied visas by the Azerbaijani Embassy in
Tbilisi was given as five.)On 10 September, the Azerbaijani parliament
adopted an appeal to NATO Secretary General Jaap de Hoop Scheffer to
retract the invitation extended to the Armenian side, citing what it
termed Armenia’s aggression and policy of ethnic cleansing.

The opposition daily “Azadlig” on 10 September quoted Foreign Minister
Elmar Mammadyarov as saying that Azerbaijan would not grant visas
to the Armenians. And on 10 September, the Azerbaijani parliament
adopted an appeal to NATO Secretary General Jaap de Hoop Scheffer to
retract the invitation extended to the Armenian side, citing what
it termed Armenia’s aggression and policy of ethnic cleansing. The
parliamentarians argued that the presence in Baku of Armenian military
personnel could aggravate tensions in the region. President Aliyev
stated while visiting the Barda region on 11 September, “I do not
want the Armenians to come to Azerbaijan.”

In an apparent last-ditch effort to persuade Baku to abandon its
obstructionist approach, de Hoop Scheffer summoned Azerbaijani Foreign
Minister Mammadyarov and his Armenian counterpart Vartan Oskanian to
Brussels on 13 September for talks. Oskanian subsequently praised the
NATO decision to call off the exercises, adding at the same time that
he regrets the “lost opportunity for regional cooperation.”

Armenia hosted the NATO Cooperative Best Effort-2003 exercises,
in which some 400 troops from 19 countries, including the United
States, the United Kingdom, Russia, Georgia, and Turkey practiced
routine peacekeeping exercises. Azerbaijan declined to participate. In
February 2004, a junior Azerbaijani officer attending a NATO-sponsored
English language course in Budapest hacked a sleeping Armenian fellow
student to death with an axe.

The full impact of Azerbaijan’s violation of NATO’s “principle of
inclusiveness” and of NATO’s ensuing decision to cancel the planned
exercises is difficult to predict. The move is likely to corroborate
many Azerbaijanis’ conviction that NATO is guilty of double standards
and bias toward Armenia. It may also give rise to a certain coolness
between Brussels and Washington, in light of persistent rumors that the
United States is considering Azerbaijan as a possible location for a
rapid-reaction force. Certainly the prediction by one Western analyst
that “Azerbaijan will enter NATO by 2005,” which made headlines in
the Azerbaijani press in July 2002, now seems somewhat overoptimistic.