AZERBAIJANI PRESIDENT ARRIVES IN WASHINGTON
Aida Sultanova
AP Worldstream
Apr 26, 2006
Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliev arrived late Tuesday in Washington,
where Iran, energy supplies and the nearly two-decade-old conflict
over his country’s ethnic Armenian-dominated Nagorno-Karabakh enclave
were expected to top the agenda during his visit.
Azerbaijan has sought to carefully balance its aspirations for closer
cooperation with the United States with Russia and its volatile
neighbor Iran. Now the nation of 7.9 million faces the question of
whether it should join in pressuring Tehran to abandon its alleged
nuclear arms program _ a topic certain to come up in Aliev’s White
House meeting with U.S. President George W. Bush later in the week.
For his part, Aliev will be looking for the United States to pledge to
put more pressure on Armenia to make concessions in the 18-year-old
Nagorno-Karabakh conflict. At least 30,000 people were killed and
1 million made refugees during six years of war that ended with a
shaky cease-fire in 1994. Ethnic Armenian forces occupy the enclave
inside Azerbaijan.
The United States, together with Russia and the Organization for
Security and Cooperation in Europe, is trying to mediate a resolution.
U.S. criticism of Aliev’s domestic policies has been muted, due in
large part to Baku’s role in supplying the West with Caspian Sea oil
through the Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan pipeline. The first shipments are due
this June, and in the fall the new Baku-Tbilisi-Erzerum gas pipeline
will provide a new source of energy for the Turkish market.
Azerbaijani opposition leaders worried that the Iran issue, too,
had pushed rights concerns further down the U.S. list of priorities.
Foreign observers said last fall’s parliamentary elections, as well
as the 2003 election that cemented Aliev’s grip on power after the
death of his father Geidar Aliev, did not meet international standards.
“We understand that today, the question of Iran is more important than
the problem of Azerbaijan’s democratization,” said Sardar Jamaloglu,
deputy head of the Democratic Party of Azerbaijan.
But there is palpable ambivalence at home about how to handle the
crisis roiling around Iran, its huge Caspian Sea neighbor.
“We maintain relations with both the United States and with Iran,”
said Ali Hasanov, a senior Aliev aide. “The citizens of our country
support close ties with Iran.”
From: Emil Lazarian | Ararat NewsPress
