Blouin News , NY
Jan 29 2015

Azerbaijan hedges its bets amid Armenian tensions

January 29, 2015 by Natalie Shure

Azerbaijani officials claimed Thursday to have shot down an Armenian
drone in their territory, Reuters reports. Although Armenia brushed
off the charge as “absurd,” the episode is the latest in a series of
escalating tensions between the uneasy neighbors of the South-Caucasus
region.

The two nations’ dispute centers on the autonomous region of
Nagorno-Karabakh, an Armenian-majority area inside Azerbaijan. Mutual
resentment between the two groups built up in the late-Ottoman era
partially due to Armenia’s disastrous relationship with Turkey, with
whom Azerbaijan shares close cultural ties. The conflict lay
relatively dormant under Soviet rule, until violence broke out in 1988
over control of Nagorno-Karabakh. The 1994 ceasefire left this a
relatively open question, prompting regional analyst Svante E. Cornell
to dub the territory “the mother of all unresolved conflicts” in the
post-Soviet world.

Since the Soviet collapse, Armenia has remained a staunch Russian
ally, while Azerbaijan has developed significant ties to the U.S. and
the E.U. Officials in the West consider Azerbaijani friendship
important in light of its many strategic advantages: it borders both
Russia and Iran, is rich in oil, and is a secular Muslim supporter of
Israel.

The contested Armenian drone tails over a year of nearby skirmishes
between the two states, leaving many observers puzzled about the root
cause of the increased unrest. There is plenty of evidence that the
hot button of Nagorno-Karabakh is being pressed for reasons that have
less to do with Armenia than they do with Azerbaijan’s ties to the
West. Throughout 2014, Azerbaijan’s dismal human rights record began
to attract international attention, including a New York Times op-ed
condemning the U.S. for ignoring the anti-democratic measures taken by
our ally. The Azerbaijani ambassador’s response to the piece sheds
light on what is perhaps the underlying motive for sounding the alarm
on Nagorno-Karabakh: human rights abuses of the Azerbaijani government
are not the problem, he argued, Armenian abuses are. In other words,
the heightened drama surrounding Nagorno-Karabakh could be a tool to
attract international support and deflect attention from the domestic
crackdown.

Despite its pro-Western strategy, Azerbaijan does seem to be hedging
its bets with Russia as well: many observers have argued this is
likely a self-preservation response to the conflict in Ukraine.
Because Russia has publicly attested its support for Armenia in the
Nagorno-Karabakh dispute, Baku appears to be stoking a preemptive
friendship. Russia has been supplying more military supplies to
Azerbaijan as of late, and the countries recently made a deal for a
railway running through Azerbaijani territory to connect Russia and
Iran. At the same time, Baku appears to be chilling relations with
Washington: in December, a government raid forcibly shut down
U.S.-backed RFERL’s Baku bureau, and jailed one of their journalists
focusing on corruption in Baku.

Wedged strategically and philosophically between the Russian and
Western spheres, it’s clear that Azerbaijan conceives Nagorno-Karabakh
in broad geopolitical terms. For now, it seems intent on forcing the
global community to see its domestic crackdown and dispute with
Armenia as completely separate issues. Given Baku’s tricky set of
interests, this hardly seems to be a savvy analysis.