Seattle Post Intelligencer, WA
June 8 2007
Azerbaijan favors anti-missile idea
By DOUGLAS BIRCH
ASSOCIATED PRESS WRITER
MOSCOW — Officials in Azerbaijan, a nation with a questionable human
rights record and huge oil reserves, on Friday welcomed Moscow’s call
to use a Russian-leased radar installation in their country as the
cornerstone of a proposed U.S. anti-missile system.
Elmar Mammadyarov, Azerbaijan’s foreign minister, said in the capital
of Baku that the proposal "can only bring more stability into the
region because it can lead to more predictable actions in the
region."
Novruz Mamedov, head of the Azerbaijani presidential administration’s
international relations department, told Russia’s Rossiya TV that
"such cooperation can have a very strong and positive impact on the
situation in the world as a whole.
"If such countries as Russia and the U.S. cooperate, they will have
common interests and it will prevent tensions," he said.
For weeks, Russian President Vladimir Putin bitterly denounced the
U.S. plan to build a missile interceptor base in Poland and a radar
site in the Czech Republic, saying the system was aimed at Russia’s
strategic arsenal.
Then on Thursday, Putin caught President Bush off guard by urging
that the Soviet-era radar installation at Gabala, in northeast
Azerbaijan, be used instead as part of a joint U.S.-Russian missile
shield. On Friday, he suggested the missile intercepter base could be
in Turkey or at sea.
Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said Friday that Putin’s idea was
worth studying, but stressed that negotiations on putting the bases
in eastern Europe would continue.
"One does not choose sites for missile defense out of the blue," she
said in an interview with The Associated Pres. "It’s geometry and
geography as to how you intercept a missile."
A Russian military expert said the Gabala installation was built to
track U.S. bombers and submarine-launched missiles from the Indian
Ocean.
The Bush administration has said it seeks to counter future missile
threats to Europe from Iran, which Washington fears is developing
nuclear weapons.
Azerbaijan, a former Soviet nation of 8.5 million about the size of
Maine, is on the western shore of the Caspian Sea, flanked by Russia
to the north and Iran to the south. It is one of the countries in
Central and South Asia that the U.S. has turned to since the Sept. 11
attacks, despite their mixed records on human rights and democracy.
The government in Baku has contributed 150 soldiers to the war in
Iraq and 20 to coalition military forces in Afghanistan.
According to a Council of Europe report last year, Baku has served as
a refueling stop for CIA aircraft shuttling terror suspects to secret
prisons.
The country has rich oil and natural gas deposits – Baku was one of
the first oil boomtowns in the 19th century. But according to
government statistics, nearly one-fifth of the population lives in
poverty.
Azerbaijani authorities have been criticized by rights groups and the
U.S. government for their hostility to independent and opposition
journalists.
Human Rights Watch says that over the past year or so, authorities
have prosecuted and imprisoned seven journalists, mostly on charges
of criminal libel and "insult." Journalists are also attacked and
threatened with violence, the group said.
The State Department’s human rights report for 2006 said the
Azerbaijani government engages in the arbitrary arrest and detention
of political opponents.
The country is also the site of one of the "frozen conflicts" left
over from the post-Soviet era. Azerbaijan and Armenia are at odds
over Nagorno-Karabakh, a region that is inside Azerbaijan but has
been controlled by ethnic Armenian forces since a 1994 cease-fire
ended a six-year war.
From: Emil Lazarian | Ararat NewsPress
