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Dr. Michael Ochs examined politics in Azerbaijan since the parliamentary elections of 1995. He began with a discussion of the republicÃs recent political history. The conflict with the separatist enclave of Nagorno-Karabakh remains the dominant issue in Azerbaijan, distracting the latterÃs leaders from the state-building process. As a result, Azerbaijan has been the most unstable former Soviet republic. Moreover, the republic has been polarized between government and opposition, unlike the Baltic states where many people were simultaneously members of the Communist Party and the Popular Fronts. He then described AzerbaijanÃs parliamentary elections, which the OSCE dubbed ìunfree and unfair." Ochs then turned to his main subject, politics in Azerbaijan after these elections. His main argument was that Aliev benefited tremendously from these elections, although in many respects they just reinforced what was already the case: that Aliev was far and away the dominant player on the Azerbaijani political landscape. He is head of government, head of state, and commander-in-chief of the armed forces, appoints all regional governors, and rules by decree. In these elections, he obtained a large majority in parliament, yet was able to quote a Council of Europe report to the effect that these problematic elections were at least ìa step forward." While he can technically be impeached, this is practically impossible. In any case, few politicians dare to challenge Aliev, whose political skills, honed during his long tenure in the KGB, are unrivaled in the republic. Even the opposition tends to see in him the only likely guarantor of stability in the republic. He has systematically replaced elites from power centers like Baku and Gyandzha with cadres from his own native Nakhichevan. The opposition has been marginalized, obtaining only a few seats in the new parliament. The political system, however, is unlikely to survive Aliev, according to Ochs. Ochs proceeded to examine the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict. There has been a cease-fire (more or less observed) in effect since May 1994, and RussiaÃs behavior at the January 1996 CIS summit suggests that it is ready to push for a settlement whereby the disputed region stays in Azerbaijan but has autonomous status. In addition, the new status given to the Azeri region of Nakhichevan, that of an ìautonomous stateî within Azerbaijan, could prove to be a precedent for the settlement of the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict. Ochs concluded with a discussion of US-Azerbaijan relations. The US, he said, officially does not have a position on how ownership of the Caspian Sea and its oil resources should be structured, although it tacitly supports AzerbaijanÃs position that the sea should be divided rather than jointly owned. The US has also taken steps enabling it to increase the amount of aid it provides to the country. The US sees Aliev as the best guarantor of stability in Azerbaijan and the best way to develop economic and political relations with the new state.
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OCHS: Before I begin, I should explain what I did in Baku and how I got there. When I was in Baku in July 1995 for a brief visit, I had no expectation whatsoever that a couple of months later I would wind up back in Baku for a long-term project. In August 1995, the State Department called and asked whether I would be interested in representing the OSCE in a joint electoral observation project with the UN. It was the second such observation project, the first having been in Armenia in July. The third was in Kyrgyzstan in December 1995. Thus there seems to be developing a pattern of joint electoral observation between the OSCE and the UN.
What''s most important about this is that once the UN got involved (not a foregone conclusion because of disappointments relating to the Armenian election), we had the highest level access that could have been imagined in the country through the person of the UN representative in Baku who had been there from 1992 to 1995. That is, because we had been invited by the president and the government of Azerbaijan, because they were interested in this project, we had frequent communication with Geidar Aliev, and with Rasul Guliev in particular, the two most powerful men in the country.
Thus, because of the UN''s close involvement and its close working relationship with Geidar Aliev and Rasul Guliev, the leadership of the country was always very well informed about what we were thinking about the election, how it was going, and about what they could expect from us. I wanted to avoid all surprises and so did the UN. I say this because I had been in Kazakstan for the March 1994 parliamentary election, and I was present when the OSCE Parliamentary Assembly distributed its assessment of that election, declaring that it did not correspond to international standards. I was there to see the look on the faces of the Kazak diplomats, who had expected that they were going to get a clean bill of health, and saw how they were absolutely flabbergasted when it became clear that they were not going to get one.
That having been said, I don''t actually plan to spend a lot of time talking about the election. I''m just going to give you a brief bit of background, talk to you a little bit about the election, and then discuss Azerbaijani politics after the election (that is, Geidar Aliev, the parliament, Nagorno-Karabakh, Russian-Azerbaijani relations, and US-Azerbaijani relations).
Since 1988, of course, Azerbaijan has been involved in a conflict over Nagorno-Karabakh. Both the military and public relations aspects of this conflict have gone badly for Azerbaijan. As a result, today about 20 percent of the country''s territory is occupied. According to the UN High Commissioner for Refugees, there are about a million refugees and internally displaced people, and this conflict has distracted the leadership and society. In other words, that which other states in more stable circumstances might have gotten around to doing, in terms of state-building, institution-building, and the like, has been much more complicated in Azerbaijan. Moreover, the conflict has been a very powerful factor in the remarkable political instability in the country. I think it''s fair to say that Azerbaijan has been the most unstable former Soviet republic, even more so than Georgia. When you consider that since 1990 you have had three essentially extra-constitutional changes of leadership, and that you have three people today who claim the presidency of Azerbaijan, this outdoes even Georgia.
In addition to this, all of these extra-constitutional changes of power have been accompanied by, to some degree or other, foreign intervention. The most blatant and flagrant of these instances took place in the June of 1993, when Surat Huseinov (at the time a warlord based in Gyandzha) made common cause with the local Russian military commander who up and left a year before the Russians were supposed to leave Azerbaijan and, according to all the accounts I''ve seen and heard, left all of his weapons to Huseinov who promptly mounted an armed rebellion. The second such instance was in the March of 1995. The first deputy foreign minister, Rovshan Dzhavadov, was involved in what the authorities described as an attempted coup d''état (which it may have been -- it''s a complicated issue). Immediately after this coup was put down, the Turkish ambassador left in a hurry. Thus you will not find anyone in Azerbaijan who will tell you that the country''s fate is decided exclusively in Azerbaijan.
Another thing that''s worth pointing out as a backdrop to the election is that because of the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict''s refugees, the economic decline, and the occupation of Azerbaijan''s territory, the necessary state-building that I mentioned essentially has not taken place. Therefore a division of powers in Azerbaijan, though often proclaimed, essentially does not exist. In other words, the election was, from the very beginning, under the very heavy influence of the executive authorities.
Now I''ll give a little background on government-opposition relations in Azerbaijan. If any of you either traveled to or followed the Baltic states in the late 1980s, you know that there was an interesting process of intermingling between the leaders of the Communist Party and the membership of the Popular Fronts that were formed at the time, and in some instances there was even coalescence. You may remember that in Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania, a lot of people were members simultaneously of both organizations, and this interaction lubricated the slide into what at the time was just embryonic electoral politics for these communist leaders, many of whom went on to become elected.
In Azerbaijan none of this took place. There was never any close interaction between government forces and the opposition. I''m not saying that there wasn''t negotiation between them, sometimes overt, sometimes covert. I''m talking about institutional merging. This did not take place, and therefore when the Popular Front in Baku seemed in 1989 to pose a very serious threat to the Communist regime at the time, Moscow (in the person of Mikhail Gorbachev) proved willing to do in Baku what it was never willing to do in Vilnius -- it sent in the Army to keep a Communist regime in power.
From the perspective of domestic politics, this means that there has been a tradition in Azerbaijan of extremely polarized politics. The sort of easy interaction between Communist leaders and the opposition that was characteristic of the Baltic states in the 1980s is not at all characteristic of Azerbaijan. The one exception -- and he''s not a real exception -- to this might be Etibar Mamedov who is the chairman of the National Independence Party. He''s not a real exception to this general statement because he negotiates with the authorities; he is not part of the authorities and they are not part of him. (He negotiates actually quite badly with the authorities, but that''s a different matter.)
As a result of this very polarized atmosphere between government and opposition in Azerbaijan, the lead-up to the election was polarized, characterized by extreme mutual distrust. Both sides had the worst possible expectations regarding the other, and not undeservedly. This was the drama of the election, because it wasn''t clear who was going to be allowed to take part in the election.
Now, with that as a backdrop, what was this election supposed to do? From the government''s perspective, from Geidar Aliev''s perspective, the mandate of the previously elected parliament had lapsed. There was a parliamentary election in 1990 and that parliament''s mandate was up. So you would think it was obvious that you had to hold a new election. It was not an obvious thing, however, because the authorities often said that given the objective circumstances they were in, given that the territory was occupied, that there were so many refugees and the like, they should get a lot of credit for holding elections. What really was involved here was an attempt on the part of the authorities to create what might be called viable and legitimate structures of government which did not exist, essentially. The parliament that was functioning up to that time was a sort of ad hoc body that had no real constitutional basis, nor could it have had one because no Constitution had been adopted after Azerbaijan''s declaration of independence.
From the perspective of the international community, the invitations to the UN and to the OSCE and to many other international observers (invitations that were made bilaterally through the parliament) were obviously designed to get international legitimacy as well as the domestic legitimacy that the creation of these viable structures and permanent structures would and should have brought. From the opposition''s perspective, the elections offered a chance to get back into politics, from which they had been largely excluded.
Now I''d like to spend a couple of minutes on the election. Azerbaijan''s new parliament has 125 seats; 25 are distributed proportionally among the political parties, and 100 were contested in 100 electoral districts. A few points about the electoral law are worth making, and I''ll give you a basis for comparison here with Armenia and Georgia. The law created extremely harsh requirements for participation. I wouldn''t say they were prohibitive, but they were very high hurdles. Let me give you an example. The ratio of the population of Armenia to that of Georgia is about 1:2. In Armenia, for an individual candidate to run in July 1995, she or he needed to gather 500 signatures. In Azerbaijan, with a population about twice the size, candidates needed 2000; in other words, four times as many. In Armenia, a political party could field a party list with 10,000 signatures. In Azerbaijan, with twice the population, they needed 50,000, in other words five times as many. In addition, in Armenia, five percent national representation was enough to get you into Parliament. In Azerbaijan, you needed eight percent.
Georgia is a very interesting anomaly here, because with a population of something over five million, political parties also needed 50,000 signatures. However, in Georgia, it being a typically Georgian election, there were 54 parties participating. Now it''s true that about 27 of them didn''t need to gather the 50,000 signatures because they were already in Parliament and the Georgian parliamentary electoral law stipulated that if you were already in Parliament, you didn''t need to go through the process again. Nevertheless, that means that we are talking about another 30 parties that managed to gather 50,000 signatures.
At the same time that the Azerbaijani law mandated very harsh requirements for participation, it mandated that very high voter turnout was necessary for the election to be valid. In Armenia, only 25% participation was necessary, as, for example, in Russia''s parliamentary elections. In Azerbaijan they needed a 50% turnout. So the law placed both political parties and candidates in a difficult situation. It was difficult for them to participate, and at the same time it put an awful lot of pressure on electoral authorities to see to it that the election would be valid, given the high turnout requirements.
What happened eventually is that out of approximately 1,000 candidates who tried to run, about 60 percent were eliminated on the grounds that their signatures were invalid due to a very questionable process of signature verification. The signature sheet is a big sheet of paper with voters'' names, addresses, information, etc., and at the end of it there is a signature. Since the law specified no methodology for the verification of signatures, what they did was to get "handwriting experts" from the Ministry of Justice, and a couple from the Ministry of Internal Affairs, who claimed to be able, literally on the basis of a purely visual examination, to say, "this is a good signature," "this is a bad signature," "this is a forgery," "three people wrote this one," etc. On this basis, 60 percent of the individual candidates were excluded, as well as four of the twelve parties that tried to field party lists.
I have to say, having seen an awful lot of these signature lists, that there were times when the Central Electoral Commission had a point. I saw many signatures that looked suspect even to my untrained Western eye. I don''t know whether you''ve ever tried to look at signatures of Americans and decide whether these are actual, real signatures. It is very difficult to do in Azerbaijan, where, for example, you don''t know in what language the people are actually writing (they could be doing it in Russian; it could be Azeri; and the alphabets have changed). In any event, on the basis of this methodology, quite a lot of candidates were excluded, and one third of the political parties.
Of the parties that remained, most were pro-Aliev; there was one strongly oppositionist party, the Popular Front, and one moderate opposition party, the National Independence Party. Musavat, an opposition party closely allied with the Popular Front, was excluded in the most controversial decision of this election. All four parties that were excluded appealed to the Supreme Court. The Supreme Court turned down all of the appeals.
Let me give you a little more comparative information concerning Armenia and Georgia. In the November election which took place in Georgia one week before the election in Azerbaijan, there were 38 appeals to the Supreme Court. The Supreme Court heard 32 of them and registered 17. In Armenia, of the appeals that were made to the Supreme Court protesting exclusion, in not one instance did that Supreme Court overturn the ruling of the Central Election Commission that excluded particular people or parties from the electoral process. In Azerbaijan, not one of the parties that appealed was reregistered, and in only 2 cases of individual candidates'' appeals, according to the chairman of the Supreme Court, was the exclusion overturned.
Let me now turn quickly to the results of the election. I''m not going to get into the voting day problems, but there were very serious problems on voting day, as a result of which our mission decided that the elections did not meet international norms for free and fair elections. The OSCE Parliamentary Assembly, which had characterized the Armenian election in July as "free but not fair," characterized the Azerbaijani election as "neither free nor fair." In other words, of the three Transcaucasian countries, Azerbaijan got the worst grade. I want to stress at this point what I said at the beginning, which is that the authorities (I have in mind President Aliev and Rasul Guliev) were throughout aware of all of the concerns of the international monitors since we met with them frequently and told them. They knew that this was coming. You can draw your own conclusions as to what that means.
Where do we stand today after this election? Let''s start with Geidar Aliev. Geidar Aliev stands pretty tall after this election. In the first place, from his perspective, nothing bad happened. Now, you could argue that having an election that is deemed "neither free nor fair" is a bad thing. But the fact is that having international observers characterize your elections as "neither free nor fair" or something like that doesn''t really mean very much. If you look at the comparative spin control that was performed in Kazakstan in 1994 (I''m leaving Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan and Tajikistan off the continuum entirely), Armenia in 1995, and now Azerbaijan, it is evident that these governments have basically come to realize that if you get a bad grade from the international community as far as the election goes, it is not so terrible. They understood this all along, of course, but now it''s very clear.
This was really the only bad thing that happened, and Geidar Aliev played it very well. On November 24, at the first session of the new parliament, he got up and said: "Look, I understand that there were problems with this election. Anyone who thinks that there might have been an absolutely fair election doesn''t understand anything. But, on the basis of what we''ve done and what we''ve accomplished, it is a step forward." And here he had the opportunity to use the assessment of the Council of Europe which gave him what he needed, that is, what happened in Azerbaijan was "a step forward." So this is a very small minus, and here I am about to give you a bunch of very powerful pluses.
What does Aliev get after this election? Let''s start first with the Constitution. There is a general tendency throughout the former Soviet Union toward strong executive power and weak parliaments. This is very much the case in Azerbaijan, with one important qualification, and I''ll get to it when I talk about the parliament. Geidar Aliev is the head of government, the head of state, and the commander in chief of the Armed Forces. He appoints all the regional governors; they are not elected. He can rule by decree. He can declare a state of emergency. He can declare martial law. He appoints the justices to the not-yet-formed Constitutional Court which is supposed to be the organ that will rule on the constitutionality of laws and government actions. Further, you may know that Azerbaijan, like any number of other former Soviet Republics, has a law that criminalizes words or actions that insult the honor and dignity of the president. This law has, in fact, been used in Azerbaijan. When I showed up in September, a bunch of journalists had been in jail since March for a silly cartoon which apparently offended Aliev. They were amnestied shortly before the election. Nevertheless, that law is on the books and now has been strengthened by a constitutional provision. It says in the Constitution that the honor and dignity of the President shall be protected. As it now stands, Geidar Aliev, or any president of Azerbaijan, can be impeached, but you would need to get 95 of the 125 members of the Parliament to go along. (You should know, incidentally, that among the members of Parliament are: Geidar Aliev''s son, Geidar Aliev''s son-in-law and Geidar Aliev''s brother. Those are just immediate family, and I understand that there are a bunch of somewhat more extended relatives.)
As far as the Parliament goes, Geidar Aliev has now done what Eduard Shevardnadze has done in Georgia, and Levon Ter-Petrosian has done in Armenia. That is, he has established his party, New Azerbaijan, as the ruling party formally. That is, they have a large majority in Parliament. Thus he stands on the same level as his counterparts and can hold his head essentially on the same level. I am not saying that this is the reason the election turned out this way, but it is not an unimportant point.
What kind of role does Aliev play in this political system? Yesterday, I happened to be looking at David Remnick''s book, Lenin''s Tomb, and he describes what Aliev did for Brezhnev when Brezhnev came to Baku. Remnick describes a ring that Geidar Aliev had made up for Brezhnev; it had a star in the middle and 15 stars all around. In other words, it represented the Sun King and all of his minions gravitating towards the center of the universe. Well, I do not want to make such a florid analogy for Geidar Aliev, but he is sort of the fulcrum of this political system and its bulwark in a number of respects.
I mean that his having obtained all of this constitutional power, his having established his party as the ruling party, confirms and strengthens what essentially had been de facto the case, namely, his preeminence in Azerbaijan''s political system. Moreover, he has a unique persona and CV, and that means, among other things, that people are afraid of Geidar Aliev in a way that they will not be afraid of anyone who comes to power after him. In fact, I do not see the political system currently being formed as one that can survive Aliev. Aliev is the necessary anchor of political stability at the moment both because of his reputation for skill in bureaucratic infighting, and because, to a certain extent, he also represents what Ned Keenan (Professor Edward Keenan of Harvard''s History Department, from whom I took courses here many, many years ago), when talking about Ivan Grozny, describes as a "conspiracy against chaos." This means that among would-be rivals, the struggle is muted. No one is interested at present, at least as far as I can tell, in getting rid of Geidar Aliev within the country. I am not talking about individual plotters who may be involved with foreign governments. I am talking about people who are in Azerbaijan''s political elite. Moreover, I do not think anyone expects that they would be successful even if they tried. He is much better at this game than they are. He is, after all, a Major General in the KGB. In addition to this, they are afraid. Everyone, even people in Musavat and in the Popular Front who hate Aliev, is afraid that if he were not around, there would be a civil war or serious chaos. So while they resent greatly his primacy, in a sense they are glad to have him around because he provides an element of predictability and stability which has long been absent in Azerbaijan and which everyone wants. In addition, Aliev has now installed his own supporters throughout the country in local positions and, incidentally, local elections will be coming up fairly soon, or so I am told. They will give Aliev a chance to strengthen his position even more.
Let me turn to the opposition, in particular, the Popular Front and Musavat. They, as I say, deeply resent Aliev''s return to power, and essentially see his tenure in office as a great injustice. I''ll talk about their position a little bit. First, and most interesting, is the situation regarding regional politics. Geidar Aliev is himself from the region of Nakhichevan. Originally his family is from Armenia, and there is a group of politicians in Azerbaijan who are called "Yerazeris" -- that is, they came from Yerevan, Armenia, to Nakhichevan, and these are the people closest to Geidar Aliev. People from other power centers in Azerbaijan, like Gyandzha or Baku, are largely out of the political game. This I knew before I went to Azerbaijan; what was interesting in Baku was to find out that even on a very local level, even in institutions, essentially there have been purges. For example, I met a woman who told me that her husband worked in a hospital, and the director of the hospital had been replaced by a Nakhichevani. I don''t know where this is going to lead, but it is important to keep in mind that those who are not Nakhichevanis, those who are not favored in terms of regional appointments and politics, are, like those who are out of the political game for reasons of political affiliation, also deeply resentful of Aliev. That''s not to say that they are in a position to act on this. That''s not to say that they are in a position to get rid of him or to cause serious trouble. But it is a weak point of the system.
In addition, the entire political system is based on personalized politics. Institutions are very weakly developed, and to the extent that anything works, well, there are powerful people in the country and they can get things done. It''s not as if officials in a ministry can make things work. In fact, because of Aliev''s reputation, because of the fact that the people are afraid of him, even ministers will not make any sort of decision, if they think it''s important, without checking with the guy at the top. It remains to be seen whether Aliev will pursue, or is at all interested in pursuing, the creation of the stable structures and institutions that will be critical to Azerbaijan''s democratic statehood.
Now I''ll turn to Aliev himself. In a couple of months, he is going to be 73; but I can vouch for his mental sharpness. I can also vouch for his physical endurance. On the day that Musavat and the Communist Party and several other parties were excluded by the Central Election Commission, we went to see him. He called the meeting. We had expected an hour-long meeting with Aliev. We showed up at the presidential building at 6:00, and we left at 10:30. He never moved from the table; he barely shifted position. Those of us on the other side of the table, who were twenty, thirty, and forty years younger than he, were dying, I can tell you. So he seems to be really in quite good physical condition. Nevertheless, he has had a couple of heart attacks, and he works a punishing schedule.
The Constitution has a mechanism worked out for succession. That is, if Aliev were unable to continue in office, the speaker of the parliament would become the acting president, as in the Russian Constitution, and he would have to call elections within three months.
Let''s turn to the Parliament. I only want to say a couple of words about this, because politics in Azerbaijan is not going to develop in the way that, for example, Russian politics developed between 1991 and 1993 (that is, a battle between the executive and legislative branches over issues, power, personalities, etc.). This a different kind of system. The most important thing about this parliament, first of all, is that it will be a very supportive parliament for Aliev. But more important is the fact that the Speaker of the Parliament was reelected unopposed on the first and only ballot on November 24. That is, Rasul Guliev, who had been speaker of the previous parliament, is now speaker again. This was interesting because Rasul had given any number of interviews before this in which he had said: "Well, I don''t really want to be Speaker." Rumors were flying around Baku that Aliev was not going to seek his reappointment, and that he in fact had come up with a replacement for him, namely his chief of staff. Nevertheless, Rasul Guliev is back as Speaker, which fact confirms and affirms again that he is the number two guy in Azerbaijan, someone who has to be reckoned with, someone whose interests Aliev must accommodate.
Why don''t we move from here to four issues. Let''s start with government-opposition relations. Where does the Popular Front, where does Musavat stand today, as far as relations with the government go? It is not hard to conclude, on the basis of what happened in an election that was so heavily influenced by the authorities, that the latter never had any intention of creating what might be called a forum for political competition with clear rules of the game in which all of the parties could participate. The Popular Front and Musavat have described the elections as unfair, undemocratic, illegitimate, have rejected their legitimacy and have called for new elections. There is no chance of that, unless something really extraordinary happens. They are in more or less the same position as after the 1990 elections. Essentially, they are marginalized and do not have much of a role in the political process. From the results of the party voting, in other words, of the 25 seats of Parliament for which political parties could contend, the Popular Front wound up with three seats, Etibar Mamedov''s party wound up with three, and Musavat, as I said, had been excluded and was not allowed to field a party list, so they are out entirely.
I don''t have the results of the February 4 repeat voting; I heard that one Musavat guy has made it into the Parliament. But think about what this means: a party that, when I showed up in Baku in September, first, was widely respected, and second, was widely thought to be one of the leading parties in the country, has one person in a 125-seat Parliament, if in fact that one person got in. It''s hard, therefore, not to conclude, at least as far as Musavat goes, that there was an intention on the part of powerful individuals or parties to remove them from the political process. To some extent you could argue that Musavat played the role that the Dashnaks played in Armenia.
Now how does this affect relations between the Popular Front and Musavat? (Incidentally, I don''t imagine you get Zerkalo here -- Zerkalo is probably the best newspaper in Azerbaijan. It comes out on Saturdays in Russian and Azeri editions. It''s not a party newspaper, and it''s really quite interesting.) On November 25, Isa Gambar, who is the chairman of Musavat, gave an interview. I have seen the translation since then in FBIS, so if you come across it I recommend it to you. In it, he talks about relations between Musavat and the Popular front. These are allied parties, both in terms of program, doctrine, etc. Moreover, there are very close personal relations among all the leaders of these parties. Ali Karimov in the Popular front and Isa Gambar, Asim Molla-Zade -- all of these people are old friends; but they are nevertheless at the same time representing competing political parties. I expect the following process to take place: the consolidation and merger of small political parties, of which there are many in Azerbaijan, with some larger party which is more successful electorally, it would seem. In such a process, the Popular Front, which rather surprisingly found itself in the parliament, may be in a better competitive position than Musavat. After all, the Popular Front has representation, Musavat does not. The parliament has a five-year tenure, and if you are a politician and want to have some influence, you have to make a choice about whether you are going to go with the party that seems to be out of Parliament and out of decision-making for five years, or whether you are going to go with the Popular Front.
Now I''d like to speak about these two opposition parties in general. Despite their having characterized the elections as illegitimate, unfair, undemocratic and so on, they nevertheless fielded candidates in the February 4 repeat elections. What does this mean? It means that essentially they are demonstrating to Aliev, to Azerbaijani society and to all of us that they understood that they had no options and no choice. In other words, Geidar Aliev makes all the rules in this game. Even though they reject the process as unfair, they take part in it; and by their very participation, they validate the process. Moreover, by being forced into this position, they reveal themselves to Azerbaijan and everyone else as weak actors. What Geidar Aliev is going to do with these parties is also unclear and remains to be seen.
Turning to the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict, you probably know that there has been a cease-fire since May 1994. For the most part, it is holding, though it is violated on a fairly regular, if occasional, basis. This is interesting in itself, because it means that the situation before 1994, when the authorities in both capitals (well, in three capitals if we include Karabakh) did not necessarily control the people who had guns, is no longer the same. In addition, we now have a situation in which the leaders of the three parties to the conflict appear very much interested in coming to some sort of resolution.
The most important recent event in the Karabakh conflict was the CIS summit in January, when some very interesting things happened. First, sanctions were introduced on Abkhazia. In fact, the Abkhaz question was one of the most important questions addressed at this summit. Second, Boris Yeltsin ordered newly appointed Foreign Minister Yevgenii Primakov to "step up" Russian diplomacy in the Karabakh conflict. Even before the summit, and even before Primakov''s appointment, Vladimir Kazimirov, the Russian negotiator in the Karabakh conflict, had already been announcing new Russian initiatives and proposals. Thus it seems that, at the end of 1995 or the beginning of 1996, it had been decided that Russia was going to become more involved. We''ll get to what this might mean in a moment.
The most concrete and interesting thing relating to Karabakh that was done or said at the CIS summit was a remark by Boris Yeltsin. In it, he said something like this, according to an FBIS account: "The best Karabakh can get is autonomous republic status." And then, being Yeltsin, he said something like: "What more do they want? They want to be like the United States?"
I understand from people who have recently come back from the region that people in Baku are very pleased about all of this. People in Yerevan are unhappy. On the basis of what Yeltsin said and on the basis of what was done and said with Abkhazia, people seem to have concluded that Moscow has decided, after its disastrous involvement in Chechnya, that it is better to back away from separatist movements and to be much more serious about territorial integrity. The funny thing about this, though, is that I am not aware of any Russian government, as opposed to the Russian Duma or individual Russian legislators, that has ever said anything other than "We respect the territorial integrity of the former Soviet republics." Now, it is true that they have not yet signed a treaty with Ukraine. It is also true that Andrei Kozyrev in the June of 1993 gave an interview to Le Monde in which he talked about the possibility of holding referenda in areas where people might not want to be part of those new republics. Nevertheless, I have never seen any government official outside of Moscow talk about anything that would place in doubt Russia''s commitment to the territorial integrity of its neighbors, regardless of the fact that, at the same time, things were going on, especially in Georgia and in Azerbaijan, which would indicate that they had no intention whatsoever of respecting the territorial integrity of their neighbors. Therefore, I would submit that, rather than get very excited about the apparent reinforced commitment to territorial integrity on part of Moscow, we should be a little more cautious here.
Much more interesting in what Yeltsin said, it seems to me, was his comment that: "The best they can hope for is autonomous republic status." Now this is interesting, because the status of Karabakh is not an issue, according to the OSCE Minsk Group rules, for any of the individual members of the Minsk Group to discuss. This is a Minsk Group discussion. And I''m not aware of any other government that is involved in the Minsk Group that has made any public statements about what the future limits of Karabakh''s status might be. I do not know exactly what that means. It could be that maybe someone gave Yeltsin bad talking points, that maybe Yeltsin did not like the talking points, that maybe he made an impulsive remark. But let''s assume that there is a certain reason for what he said. What kind of deal might be in the works and what are the problems with this deal?
You''re going to have Joe Presel up here at some point, are you not? Ambassador Joe Presel is the US negotiator in Karabakh. He gave a talk in Washington a couple of weeks ago, and basically, the sort of deal that he thinks most people see coming is a deal that would maintain, de jure, Azerbaijan''s territorial integrity and give Karabakh some sort of autonomous status. There will be the corridor that exists now (the Lachin corridor between Karabakh and Armenia), and maybe some sort of divided control of Shusha; but it''s not clear yet. In any event, the general idea is that de jure and nominally Azerbaijan will maintain its territorial integrity.
This is not necessarily the view of any of the parties, except for Azerbaijan, whose bottom line is that no Azerbaijani government can make a deal that would give up sovereignty over Karabakh and in any way violate the current territorial integrity of the country. Incidentally, the constitution affirms the country''s territorial integrity, describes it as a unitary state and, in fact, does not even mention Nagorno-Karabakh. Everything else, as far as I can see, from Baku''s point of view, is negotiable. But not territorial integrity.
Here we come upon an interesting possibility, because if you''ve read Azerbaijan''s constitution, you will come to a section that discusses the new status of Nakhichevan which is the "exclave" separated from the rest of Azerbaijan by Armenia. Nakhichevan used to be an autonomous republic. It is now "an autonomous state" within the borders of Azerbaijan. This was a very controversial provision in the new constitution. Musavat, for example, and Etibar Mamedov''s Party of National Independence were very much against this. They were afraid, first of all, that creating this sort of status for Nakhichevan could lead to the ultimate federalization of the country. Second, they were afraid of precisely this, that it would create a precedent for the status of Karabakh which they didn''t like. I saw an interview in Zerkalo with one of the guys who drafted the constitution. He acknowledged at a press-conference that this might be an option.
Here is a quick bit of information on what Nakhichevan has, what sort of prerogatives it has, according to the new constitution. It has its own parliament, its own cabinet, its own constitution, although this constitution can''t contradict Azerbaijan''s constitution. It has no president, which Robert Kocharian, the leader of Nagorno-Karabakh, will not find very palatable. And most of the rights it has deal with socio-economic questions and environmental questions, taxes, etc. It does not have foreign policy prerogatives, and it certainly has no armed forces.
I do not know whether the Nakhichevan formula will be or would be a precedent, because I am not sure that Baku is planning to offer this to Karabakh in the negotiations. Nevertheless, it is there on the table, and everyone knows it. Thus it is something that they can offer above what they have been offering for several years, which is cultural autonomy, what the previous Elchibey government in Azerbaijan was offering. It is more than autonomous republic status. So, if you want to play a game of names in terms of sovereignty ("we''re not giving you the old names, we are giving you a new name"), here is one option.
I want to be sure to make this point: if there is going to be a deal on Karabakh, if we take seriously the notion that Russia is more interested in a deal now than it was before, we run into questions of election deadlines. As you all know, Russia is holding a presidential election in June; but Armenia is also holding a presidential election, in September. If they come up with a deal that Boris Yeltsin thinks might enhance his prospects (although I don''t think that foreign policy in general is going to play a role in the election -- certainly not an issue like Karabakh, where Russian soldiers aren''t dying), if they can cut a deal that will make Russia look good, then it would seem to me that Boris Yeltsin would want very much to have this before the June election. By "making Russia look good," I mean the following: that Moscow is seen as the deal-maker, or at least that it gets the credit for being the deal-maker; that CIS forces, which would mostly be Russian forces, predominate in any international peacekeeping; and if Moscow can get what they have been trying to get in Azerbaijan for some time: military bases, joint border controls, and a common air defense system. On the other hand, if this is a deal which for some reason is not very palatable in Armenia, then I would think that Levon Ter-Petrosian would prefer to have it concluded after the September election. Thus we could come up against a sort of conflict of interest here.
One quick thing. Up until now Aliev has been resisting very strenuously Russian demands for the kind of security guarantees and physical assets in the country that Moscow has been wanting. That does not mean necessarily that if a deal could be cut on Karabakh, he would continue to resist. I am not saying that he is going to make a deal with Primakov; but he may. And in that connection, it''s worth pointing out that Azerbaijan''s new constitution does not explicitly bar foreign military bases.
I''ll now move on to the last topic, which is US-Azerbaijan relations. I assume that most of you are familiar with the Caspian Sea controversy, that is, the dispute about the legal status of the Caspian Sea. You know that Russia''s Foreign Ministry has contested Azerbaijan''s right to dispose of the resources in its "sector of the Sea." Russia''s Foreign Ministry does not accept that the Sea has been divided into sectors, or that it can be or should be. Washington has not adopted a public position on the status of the Caspian Sea. American oil companies, however, are involved in all of these deals, and Bill Clinton called Geidar Aliev in early October, several days before the October 9, 1995 decision on the dual pipelines, expressing support for a multiple pipeline solution to the problem. In other words, even though no one at the State Department will tell you this, essentially, and tacitly, the US government has come out on Azerbaijan''s side in this controversy. After all, our oil companies are already there, and we are on record as favoring a multiple pipeline solution. If you call them on this, what they will say is: "Well, what we mean by this is once agreement is reached on the status of the Caspian Sea, we favor multiple pipelines." But I leave you to draw your own inferences on what the US position is.
In other words, US oil company involvement in Azerbaijan -- and indeed growing involvement, considering that Mobil and Chevron are now getting into the act -- has obviously accentuated the geostrategic and economic importance of US-Azerbaijan relations.
In this connection, you may also know that in October 1992, the Freedom Support Act was passed in Congress. Section 907 forbids direct US government-to-government assistance to Azerbaijan. The language reads something like this: until Azerbaijan''s blockade of Armenia is lifted and until Azerbaijan ceases all aggressive action and "improves its human rights record," Washington is not allowed to send any official assistance to the government of Azerbaijan. Washington can, however, send humanitarian assistance or other assistance not through the Azerbaijan government, but through NGOs. According to Senator Mitch McConnell, who has recently sent a letter to Warren Christopher about this, we have sent $80 million over the last several years to Baku for distribution through NGOs.
The new Foreign Aid Bill, which President Clinton signed in January, now enables the president to send direct government-to-government aid to Baku for humanitarian purposes if he decides that existing arrangements, that is NGO arrangements, are inadequate to deliver this aid. In other words, along with the US government -- the Bush and Clinton administrations were always against Section 907 -- the US Congress has now diluted the implementation of Section 907 of the 1992 Freedom Support Act.
In this respect, if you compare the post-election statement that was read over at the State Department after the Azerbaijani election to the post-election statement that was read in July after the Armenian election, you will see that they are remarkably similar. In fact, some of the sentences were literally lifted out of the earlier document. In other words, it''s pretty clear that the executive, and to a somewhat different degree the legislative, branches are trying to treat Armenia and Azerbaijan as equally as possible under the influence, and growing influence, of oil and its strategic implications, especially in an American presidential election year.
Now, what that means to me (and I''ll end on this and open the floor to discussion), is that Washington sees Geidar Aliev as the best guarantor, at least at the moment, of stability in Azerbaijan, as the best way to develop US-Azerbaijan economic and political relations.
style="color: maroon;font-weight: bold;">Discussion
QUESTION: You said that you kept Aliev very well informed as to what your thinking was during the election; but you never told us what his reactions were. How do you think he felt personally about your statement that the elections were not fair and not free? I also wonder if you could comment on the problems surrounding the verification of signatures during the elections. Is this usual? How is it done in other places?
OCHS: Let me start with the actual methodology of verification of signatures. In the United States, practically every state apparently has its own rules for these things. It turns out that as a general rule, in the US, when you have an election or a referendum, signatures that are gathered are not challenged unless a specific challenge comes up, in which case they find the people in question and they check it out. What happened in Azerbaijan is, as I said, they had six or seven "experts" from the Ministry of Justice and at least two people (they always told us one, but I later found out that it was two) from the Ministry of Internal Affairs, in other words, the police. They did not, as a rule, go and check with people on whether they had signed.
Thus, when the whole thing exploded as a powerful issue, the joint OSCE/UN operation called the electoral assistance division of the UN, which suggested spot-checking for the excluded political parties and, to the extent possible, candidates. So I and my counterpart from the UN got signature lists from the four excluded parties, and spot-checked excluded signatures. The most interesting, revealing, and controversial results took place with Musavat''s spot-checking. We went to the office of the Chairman of the Supreme Court and they brought all of the signatures, some 53 thousand signatures in boxes, and with the participation of the chairman of the Supreme Court and a Musavat representative, we picked a couple of sheets of signatures. What the guys who had allegedly verified the authenticity of the signatures would do is to mark off a whole bunch of signatures and say: "These are all no-good signatures." Since we had very little time, it could only be done in Baku. So we found thirteen people whose signatures had been excluded. All thirteen people confirmed having signed for Musavat. In one case we found an elderly woman who acknowledged to us that her granddaughter, who was present in the room at the time, had signed for her because she was illiterate. Obviously, it''s not the most scientific methodology; but you do the best you can in a very short period of time, and this was just a spot-check to begin with. But the spot-checking confirmed all of our doubts about the entire methodology.
Moreover, I didn''t get into what happened on election day. The election law forbade people, when gathering signatures, to sign for anyone else. And during voting, the election law forbade anyone to vote on behalf of anyone else. But the authorities implemented very rigorously the strictures on signing for someone else; but they did not implement at all the prohibition on voting on behalf of anyone else. So they wound up exploiting, by inconsistent application, the law in order to exclude inconvenient parties; but they let everyone vote for family members on election day so that they could meet that minimum 50-percent required turnout, so that the election would be valid and the Constitution would pass.
Aliev was told about all of this, as was Rasul Guliev, as was Jafar Veliev, the chairman of the Central Election Commission. They defended the methodology. Although Aliev and Guliev and everyone else agreed to the spot-checking, in fact, they claimed to have done their own spot-checking on Musavat. During the Supreme Court hearings on Musavat, which I and others in the international diplomatic community attended from the beginning to the end, they defended their methodology and approach very unconvincingly. It was actually sort of embarrassing. But they claimed to have done their own spot-checking in various regions; they claimed to have received a huge wave of spontaneous telegrams from people claiming: "I never have signed for Musavat. How did my name wind up on this list?" And when the decision was eventually read out by the judge with television cameras all present, he was reading some of these telegrams.
Let me give you some background. In July, after leaving Armenia I came to Baku and I talked to very high-level government officials about the Armenian election and what had gone wrong with it. One of them listened very carefully and then said: "All right, so what''s going to happen to them now?" I said: "What do you mean?" "Well, Armenia has just run unfair elections -- what''s going to happen to them?" "Well, you know, their image is different from what it used to be..." He said, "Look, don''t give me that. What''s going to happen to them?" I started talking about image again, and he said: "I understand you to have told me the following: Armenia just ran unfair elections, and there are not going to be any sanctions, no cut in aid, no disgrace, no dishonor, no consequences." I can''t say for sure, but it''s impossible to escape the conclusion that this approach influenced the Azerbaijani government''s attitude toward the elections.
In March 1994, after the OSCE said that Kazakstan''s election did not conform to international standards, President Nursultan Nazarbaev resorted to an interesting "dual spin control" approach. First of all, the Kazakstani officials were shocked. They had no idea this was coming, and so they had to recover very quickly. Nazarbaev said: "Of course, these were good elections." And he dragged out the French, who said: "we disassociate ourselves from the OSCE Parliamentary Assembly assessment; we think these were fine elections." But then at the same time, he would go on television a day later and say: "What do you expect from us? How could we possibly hold good elections? You know, given our circumstances, we are a new country," etc.
Aliev played this, as I said, really quite well and the only way he could. He said in Parliament that these were not perfect elections, they could not have been, but as the Council of Europe said, they were "a step on the road." Moreover, he had previously given himself a way out, as well, blaming everything on executive authorities in the regions. At one of our meetings, Aliev said: (this is all on television the next day and all over newspapers) "I give the strictest orders to all the executive authorities throughout the country not to interfere in the electoral process," because this was the nature of many of the complaints we had been getting, "and in no way to influence on behalf of any individual candidates or parties anything else." In other words, before our assessment was made public, he left himself an out: "I have called for free and fair elections and if this is not what happened, it is the fault of local authorities." Once the assessment came in, he said: "Well, we did the best we could. 20 percent of the country is occupied, and we have all these refugees. It is a step forward. We are on the road to democracy." This has been the general line since then.
QUESTION: I would like to return to the oil issue. Could you give us a little background on this dual pipelines issue, where they run, when they''re expected to be functional? And what are the implications of this two-pipeline system for players'' abilities to impose sanctions in the future by shutting off oil in some way? Who could do that sort of thing?
OCHS: Basically, it comes down to this: the deals that have been made with the oil companies relate to two separate oil flows. One is the "early oil," and the other is called the "later oil." The deal that was made on October 9, 1995, the announcement that was made on the basis of talks between Azerbaijan''s Government and the AIOC, the oil consortium, calls for a dual-pipeline solution for the early oil.
There are two routes: the northern route and the western route. The northern route goes from Baku up through Chechnya to Novorossiisk. The Western route is supposed to go through Georgia to the port of Supsa, at least this is the understanding right now, and from there it will go to Turkey.
The timetables. It was originally thought that the early oil was going to start flowing in 1996, by the end of this year. About a week and a half ago the AMOCO people were in Washington and they told me that everything has been pushed back another year. Thus the early oil probably won''t flow until 1997, not 1996. This is important for a number of reasons. First of all, to the extent that Baku, in a very difficult economic situation, is hoping for revenues, they have longer and longer to wait.
The early oil is supposed to go through both pipelines. It is a dual solution. In January, Aliev was in Moscow for the CIS Summit and he signed a deal with Viktor Chernomyrdin, essentially finalizing the details of that northern route. My understanding was that the Turks were supposed to finalize the deal on the western route in February. I am not sure that it was done; but they pledged $230 million or $240 million for the construction of the pipeline. The northern route requires much less initial investment because the pipeline already exists. What they have to do is build it up and reverse some of the flow. As for the pipeline in Georgia, sections of it have to be built and it''s going to be more expensive.
In terms of sanctions and insurance policies. Look -- Geidar Aliev has to deal with Moscow, and essentially has to placate Moscow. And even if you aren''t motivated by the desire to see to it that Russia is not so angry at you for cutting them out of the deal and the transit fields and everything else that they might do some very nasty things, you would want some sort of insurance policy. The general idea is that if you have one pipeline and it goes bad, you need more pipelines. In fact, you may have noticed, about a week and a half ago, for the first time I have seen, a pipeline heading from Dagestan to Chechnya was blown up. In other words, anyone who thinks that the pipeline north (the pipeline goes through Grozny) is a simple thing to secure and protect is misguided. Anyone can blow up the pipelines. They''re very hard to defend.
Essentially, it is a two-route deal so far, and the question that has not been determined and is not supposed to be settled until 1997 is the route of the later oil, which is much more voluminous. I think the early oil is 450,000 tons. But there is much more of the later oil, and most people assume that if either one or both of the pipelines for the early oil works, this will influence the decision on the later oil. In other words, if you have a pipeline that is already working, and say, for example, the war in Chechnya does not go away and the northern route is being blown up all the time, obviously this would enhance the attractiveness of the Western route. Although at the same time, if you are General Grachev, or his replacement, and the northern route is not working and the western route is working, I would be very nervous if I were Eduard Shevardnadze.
These are not the only possible pipelines and, in fact, some of the scenarios for the resolution of the Karabakh conflict call for a pipeline that would go through Armenia. In many ways, from our perspective and also, I think, from the perspectives of Armenia and Azerbaijan, that is the best of all possible worlds. It''s the shortest route, and it would bind the two countries together economically so that they have a stake in peace and good neighborly relations. On the other hand, unfortunately, it is absolutely the worst outcome for Moscow. If such a pipeline were built, Moscow would have much less leeway in manipulating the two countries against each other. It would be yet another pipeline that could be operating in case the northern one doesn''t work very well. And it would be yet another one that might be getting transit fees which might otherwise be going to the northern route.
Thus, at the moment, without a settlement of the Karabakh conflict, there is no possibility of such a pipeline. Every now and then some Azerbaijani official says: "Of course, this is a possibility." And they explicitly will say: "I hope politicians in Yerevan take note of this." It has been held out as a carrot that does not have any chance of being eaten unless there is a settlement in Karabakh; let''s put it that way.
QUESTION: Do you think that the elections represented a chance for Aliev simply to consolidate power, to get rid of the roughly 25 Popular Front members of the former parliament?
OCHS: I would prefer, as far as this is concerned, to let you draw your own conclusions and inferences about what I have said. But to fill in some of the details, in answer to your question, the de facto functioning parliament, which the new parliament replaced, came into being at the end of 1991 and it featured approximately 50:50 representation of the old Party elite and the opposition. In fact, by the time of this new election, a lot of the 25 opposition members had already been eliminated anyway. Even to the extent that they hadn''t, this was a parliament that was very much in Aliev''s pocket.
The election does, of course, consolidate his control, that is, the executive control over Parliament. It does eliminate, except for essentially nominal representation, the Popular Front and it totally eliminates Musavat. Etibar Mamedov also got his nominal three seats. Thus, you have a parliament in which supporters of Geidar Aliev are in the overwhelming majority and the opposition is barely represented. So if you want to say "we held elections, we didn''t get a good grade but we''re moving forward, we are taking steps," you can. Since no one pays that much attention to grades for elections anyway, you can argue that the entire thing had been done for this purpose.
But what I was trying to argue is that this was also an attempt to create functioning structures of government. You have to remember that Rasul Guliev has to be accommodated. He is a very powerful man, he is the speaker of parliament. If you create a parliament that has no powers whatsoever, you will offend Rasul -- that''s his power base. He has other resources; but this is his power base. It''s also his international exposure. In this connection, it''s worth pointing out that in Azerbaijan, unlike Armenia and unlike Russia, there are no provisions in the constitution for the president to dissolve parliament.
I have been to Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan for elections, and, by that standard, Azerbaijan''s was fantastic. But even though the election was unfair, this does not mean that the parliament is going to be a powerless body. It depends to a large extent on Rasul Guliev, necessarily. And you can''t tell how members are going to behave once they are in a position in which, first, they have a job for five years unless there is a catastrophe, and second, they have immunity. It could be that actual political parties with parliamentary factions could develop that work the way parliamentary factions do in countries more developed institutionally in the political sense. I don''t know. But I think there is more to this in terms of possible implications than would follow from simply seeing the whole thing as a farce.
There were a lot of international observers at the election, and one of them was a Pole. He was with the Council of Europe delegation, and at the post-election press conference, he said: "Well, there were a lot of things wrong with this election, but I remember our election in Poland in 1989 to be the same. There were a lot of things wrong with that election; but that Sejm ended up doing some very good things."
QUESTION: Could you talk a little bit about the relationship between Turkey and Azerbaijan?
OCHS: First of all, Turkey and Azerbaijan are ethnically and linguistically linked. During the Popular Front government, the president, Abulfez Elchibey, was extremely pro-Turkish. The impression has become widespread that he is anti-Russian and anti-Iranian. I would qualify both of those assessments. In any case, it''s fair to say that the Popular Front was and remains extremely pro-Turkish.
I''ll give you one interesting example. The new constitution calls the state language of Azerbaijan "Azerbaijani." This was a very controversial provision in the constitution because under the Popular Front government in 1992 and 1993, the state language was called "Turkish" or "Turkic." Apparently the Azeri word does not really distinguish between the two. This was a reflection of the Popular Front''s ideology, which sees Azerbaijan as a Turkish or Turkic society and people, in the sense of a nation.
After Geidar Aliev came back to power, Azerbaijani-Turkish relations had their ups and downs. As the boss from Nakhichevan, after he came back from Moscow, he had been doing his own negotiating with the Turks because the exclave of Nakhichevan has a connection to Turkey. Geidar Aliev, based in Nakhichevan, had been essentially doing his own wheeling and dealing and negotiating with Iran, with Turkey, and with many other people, while in Baku they were worried about what Geidar Aliev was doing in Nakhichevan.
Here, however, I have to draw an inference myself; I can tell you what everyone thinks in Azerbaijan. As I said, in March of 1995 there was an "uprising" that was put down. There was a first deputy Interior minister named Rovshan Dzhavadov who had his own paramilitary group, and he and about 50 of his supporters were killed in a shoot-out with government forces. After the coup attempt was put down, the Turkish ambassador left the country. Everyone in Azerbaijan assumed that the Turks were somehow involved in this coup attempt. Incidentally, Tofiq Gasimov, the former foreign minister who served under the Elchibey government, is now charged with treason. He''s been released recently, but he was arrested in September and charged with having been involved in the March events.
I can tell you that it is widely believed that someone in the Turkish Embassy or in Ankara (and I have never heard a very convincing explanation of this) was involved in an attempt to get rid of Geidar Aliev in the March of 1995, and that it didn''t work. As a result, once the ambassador left and a new ambassador came (and I had regular dealings with him as part of the diplomatic community that was monitoring the elections), the Turks now are extremely supportive of Baku and of Geidar Aliev.
As far as Karabakh goes, Turkey has always been very supportive of Azerbaijan. They have never established diplomatic relations with Yerevan. They recognize Armenia''s independence but they have not established diplomatic relations.
The Turks, of course, are also very supportive as far as Azerbaijani relations with Russia are concerned. The Turks, for their own reasons, of course, want the pipeline for later oil, the big pipeline, to go through Turkey. The US government has actually come out in favor of this. Clinton has said that we want the pipeline to go through the Turkish port of Ceyhan. But, keep in mind that this gives Azerbaijan possibilities and a leeway that it would not have, geostrategically and economically, if their route for getting the oil out was through Novorossiisk. So, the Turks are close allies, with what may be a very funny bump in bilateral relations in early 1995.
QUESTION: I wondered if you might say a few things about the status of the Caspian sea, and how that changes the relationship between Russia and Azerbaijan?
OCHS: The status of the Caspian Sea, or the Caspian Lake, or the Caspian, is in dispute. Everyone knows it as the "Caspian Sea;" but the Russian Foreign Ministry says that the Caspian is not a sea, but is instead a lake, and therefore all the littoral states (there are five of them: Turkmenistan, Iran, Kazakstan, Azerbaijan, and Russia) have a say, and decisions about the resources of the Caspian have to be made jointly.
Azerbaijan argues to the contrary, and incidentally, the new constitution has a provision, Article 12, stating that its sector of the Caspian Sea is part of Azerbaijan''s territory. The Russian Foreign Ministry has sent at least one, and probably many more, formal notes protesting this provision of the constitution.
I am not aware that any sort of decisions have been made about a court or venue of arbitration. At the moment it''s a dispute. What''s interesting to note here is that Iran is very much on Russia''s side, although this could change because, after all, Iran was cut out of the first consortium deal. Its very open support of the Russian position on the status of the Caspian came after, at US government insistence, it was cut out of the consortium deal. You may know that Geidar Aliev has now offered Iran participation in a new oil field deal, so they might rethink their attitude on whether the Caspian is a sea or a lake.
Kazakstan is also in Azerbaijan''s camp. The Turkmens, as always, are somewhere in the middle. No one can figure out where they are because the Turkmens come out very often and say something that clearly would put them in Russia''s camp, and then privately say: "We didn''t mean any of it; don''t worry about it." So we have no idea where they actually stand on this issue.
The position of the American oil companies, so far as I can tell, since they have already obligated themselves to invest an awful lot of money, is such that they think, if the issue ever came to international arbitration, that their money would not be lost.
For what it''s worth, I know someone in Washington who was told privately by a Russian diplomat: "Look, we understand that we can''t win this battle, but we have to fight because essentially it''s a bargaining chip." And I said before that this point of view does not appear to be shared by the entire Russian government. The best evidence is that LUKoil is involved in the consortium. LUKoil is involved in the deal that was signed in November 1995 for the Karabakh field, and LUKoil will insist on participation in the other deal and on being involved in any future Azerbaijani deals.
So the Russian Foreign Ministry claims that all of these deals are illegal, that they are unilateral actions, and last year, at the United Nations, it warned in very harsh terms of severe consequences if Azerbaijan went ahead with this. Yet you have the Russian Minister of Energy and Fuel, Shafranik, in Baku two days before the election signing an agreement on LUKoil''s participation in the Karabakh field. You also have Chernomyrdin, the Prime Minister, signing an agreement with Aliev in January on the northern route, on the details of that route. So, you have a very confusing situation, which is not very surprising to all of us who follow, as best we can, what goes on in Moscow.
My reading is that they will continue to push the Caspian Sea controversy, for as long as they can get away with it, as a negotiating chip, because there is no reason for them to give it up. But they will find themselves in an awkward spot if Aliev can tempt Tehran by giving it some section of a very nice field. Then it will be awkward for Tehran to continue to follow Moscow''s line on the status of the Caspian.
QUESTION: In your view, how likely is it that a provision for bases and Russian border patrols will be a part of a settlement for Karabakh? Is it likely that Russia will insist on this given the balance of power?
OCHS: That is a very tough question. It depends a lot on what motivates Geidar Aliev. I was hoping, while I was in Baku at some point, to have a private conversation and ask him: "Why not make a deal with Moscow?" The best that I can figure is that there are a number of factors here, and a lot of it has to do with the personality of the man. You have to remember that, first of all, he is 73, and these people who are in power in Moscow, apart from Yeltsin -- they''re kids, from his perspective. In fact, he refers to the Azerbaijani opposition as the "dyeti" -- they''re the kids.
Secondly, his relations with Yeltsin are terrible, of course. In Yeltsin''s first book he describes how, when he came to Moscow -- I don''t remember how it goes word for word, but something like: "It was disgusting for me to be in a room with Geidar Aliev, in the same Politburo." So, when they hug and kiss in public you know what they''re actually thinking.
Moreover, he was personally humiliated by Gorbachev. His son was personally humiliated. I was told that his son (who is now a deputy director of the Azeri oil company, SOCAR) was prepared to be a Soviet diplomat. When the USSR fell apart, they told him "ubiraisya" -- "get out of here, we don''t need you." So there is a certain sense of personal grievance in Aliev which, I think, probably plays a not-inconsiderable role in his manful resistance to Russian pressure.
That is just a personal, subjective side of it. If you look at it as a political calculus, I have to assume that Geidar Aliev knows very well the people in Moscow. After all, he was there for many years. And he has chosen a very risky course -- Eduard Shevardnadze was almost killed in August, after all. Geidar Aliev constantly complains, "They''re trying to kill me, they''re trying to kill me," and they''re constantly announcing new assassination attempts. Now, people in the opposition say this is just his way of building up an atmosphere of terror and his own indispensability. But this is Azerbaijan. All of these claims could be real, after all. Aliev may well have concluded that, as risky as it is to fight the Russians, it is even riskier to let them in. Thus, at least as of today, he has resisted demands for bases, joint border controls and the common air defense system, of which Armenia and Georgia are part.
Now, what is interesting here is that Yeltsin may not be President in July. To the extent that personalities count in politics, Aliev could rethink this policy. I am not saying we will hear an announcement that Geidar Aliev is going to make a deal with Moscow. But it''s not impossible. I happen to think that it is unlikely, and that he is a very proud man. And he is the only guy in the CIS who has ensured that, as he likes to claim: "We don''t have Russian troops." (Actually, this is not entirely true because Russian troops are manning a radar station at Gabela.) So, I don''t think that it is likely, but if the Russians are really eager to make a deal, and they can deliver Karabakh, Aliev may not give them everything, but he may be tempted to give them something.
Here is where the election plays a role. Aliev will not have a parliament that will say "no." The worst that could happen is that, say, the Popular Front and Musavat try to protest in the streets. What can they do? They have almost no parliamentary representation. But it is not such a simple thing in Geidar Aliev''s Azerbaijan, I can assure you, to hold a street demonstration. Musavat has tried several times, always without success. If he decides to make a deal, one of the things that makes the election important is that he will be more or less confident about parliamentary ratification of any deal on Karabakh and, if necessary, if it is part of that deal, any deal with Moscow.
QUESTION: Maybe he is afraid that Russia will not deliver in good faith, and maybe that''s why he''s not willing to do it.
OCHS: You know, when he came back to power in 1993, a lot of people assumed that he was going to do what Shevardnadze gave every indication at the time of doing, although he hadn''t done it yet -- namely, take Azerbaijan into the CIS and make some kind of a deal with Moscow so that Karabakh can be resolved in a way favorable to him. None of that happened. Assuming the original assumptions are correct, it''s not clear whether none of it happened because Moscow could not deliver Karabakh, or because he began to see things differently in his relationship with Moscow. It could also be because, again, Geidar Aliev is not the kind of guy who will take orders from Moscow.
If he were not in power, it is not clear that someone else would have the same attitude toward the Russian presence and involvement in Azerbaijan, or would resist the way he has resisted. Further, it is not clear, for example, if he decided to make a deal, that his successor would like that deal. But these are very hypothetical questions.
This document is a part of the Caucasus and the Caspian Seminar Transcripts collection.
Michael Ochs is Staff Advisor to the CSCE Commission of the US Congress, where he concentrates on Transcaucasia and Central Asia, as well as on Russia''s relations with its neighbors. He was the Co-Coordinator of the OSCE/UN Joint Electoral Observation Mission in Azerbaijan from September 15 to December 1, 1995, representing the Office of Democratic Institutions and Human Rights (ODIHR). He has also observed elections in Azerbaijan in 1990 and 1992. He received his Ph.D. in Russian History from Harvard University.