Azerbaijan close to deal on hosting US forces: report

Agence France Presse
August 3, 2005

MOSCOW, Aug 3 (AFP) – Azerbaijan is close to agreement with the United
States on the establishment of a US military presence following the
eviction of American forces from Uzbekistan, a Russian newspaper
said Wednesday.

“A decision wanted by Washington has almost ripened,” the Nezavisimaya
Gazeta newspaper quoted an unnamed source close to Azerbaijan’s
foreign ministry as saying.

The president of the strategic Caspian country, Ilham Aliyev, “in
the end will give his agreement to the deployment in the country of
an American military contingent,” the source said.

Last week the ex-Soviet Central Asian state of Uzbekistan announced
it was giving the United States 180 days to close an air base there
used to support operations in nearby Afghanistan.

Nezavisimaya Gazeta said the question of stationing US forces in
Azerbaijan was on the agenda of the country’s foreign minister,
Elmar Mamedyarov, who was in Washington this week for talks with
senior administration officials.

In talks at the Pentagon, Mamedyarov would discuss “not only general
prospects for military cooperation… but an extremely concrete
question — the possibility of transferring the American base from
Uzbekistan to Azerbaijan,” the newspaper said, summarising the views
of unnamed analysts.

In response to Wednesday’s report, a spokesman for Azerbaijan’s
defence ministry, Ramiz Melikov, told AFP the ministry had “not held
any discussions regarding this issue.”

“According to the constitution of Azerbaijan, there can be no bases of
other states on the territory of the country. But if such a decision
were to be taken it would be made by the president and we have not
received any such information,” Melikov said.

Nezavisimaya Gazeta cited a source in the Azerbaijani security forces
as saying that a team of US military instructors was already in
Azerbaijan looking at two possible sites for hosting the US military,
one close to the capital Baku and the other close to the border
with Iran.

The former Soviet republic of Azerbaijan could represent a highly
strategic location for US forces, in part because it borders Iran —
one of the countries named by US President George W. Bush in his
first term as forming an “axis of evil”.

The Caspian Sea region is being developed as a major alternative to
Middle Eastern oil sources and is considered by some analysts as a
potential terrorist target.

On Wednesday the main Uzbek state newspaper, Pravda Vostoka, denied
reports that the closure of the US base was prompted by Washington’s
calls for an independent investigation into a bloody crackdown in
Uzbekistan in May and by Washington’s support for the evacuation of
refugees who fled that violence.

According to that newspaper report, the base had originally been
scheduled to close in 2002, since when Uzbekistan had raised the
issue with the United States six times.

“It is necessary to recognise that in reality the American side used
various pretexts to avoid deciding this question,” the newspaper said.

Moscow has been wary of the growing US presence in the former Soviet
republics on its southern flank, long seen as Russia’s sphere of
influence.

The United States continues to use an air base in Kyrgyzstan, while
US military instructors have been helping to train the military of
Azerbaijan’s neighbour Georgia.