US Analyst: Closure of RFE/RL bureau, latest arrests represent finishing touches to a multi-year program

Washingtonofficials last week made it clear that they’re seeking a fresh ‘engagement’ with Azerbaijan despite calls for sanctions against oil-reachgovernment amid ongoing crackdown targeting western institutions in the country. Does the new phase of “engagement” policy mean that the US is putting the RFE/RL Baku office closure behind?  

TURAN’s Washington correspondent interviewed Karl Rahder, a Chicago-based analyst and longtime Azerbaijan watcher, to give an effort to put recent developments in US-Azerbaijan relations in context.

Q. An op-ed in Washington Post later last year called the U.S. Administration for ‘push back’in responsetothe raid on RFE/RL Baku office, noting that ‘it would be bad news otherwise, both for Azerbaijan and alarming news for the region.’Some observers underscore the fact that the State Department has been using very polite expressions of 'concern' over RFE/RL raid from the very beginning. Can Washington’s reaction be considered adequate to the ongoing crackdown?

A. For many years, I’ve been telling my Azeri friends that sooner or later, Ilham Aliyev would wake up one morning and realize that he could simply tell the Americans to go to hell. That day has finally arrived. After all, what trump cards do the Americans have to play? Apart from sanctions (either Magnitsky-style or perhaps something not quite so drastic), the United States can do little to sway its “strategic partner” with respect to its human rights policy. And I am not an advocate of such sanctions in any case, primarily because of the explosive reaction that would ensue, cutting off dialogue with people within the government that the US may want to engage.

I’m not at all optimistic here, although it has to be said that the response from Washington has been rather tepid – something that indicates that the White House wants us to believe that the RFE/RL incident is an unfortunate speed bump in an otherwise productive relationship. So the State Department keeps telling the world that it is “concerned.” They are “concerned” about Khadija Ismayilova, they are “concerned” about Leyla Yunus, and they are “concerned” about the raid on Radio Azadliq. So for a start, I’d recommend that someone at the State Department walk down to Barnes & Noble [bookstore] and buy a thesaurus and look up synonyms that have a wee bit more impact than the word “concerned.”

Another mantra that should be dropped by State Department personnel is the “instability thesis.” I heard this last month at an event in Washington, and it’s almost as if some people at State are reading from Ramiz Mehdiyev’s playbook. Yes, instability is a serious issue for Azerbaijan, but not in the way Mr.Mehdiyev would have us believe. And when American diplomats talk about how they understand Azerbaijan’s fears of instability in the context of the human rights crackdown, it almost sounds like an endorsement.

Q. Why did the US-Azerbaijani relationship collapse in the first place, and what are the implications? Azerbaijan has been seeking a long-standing relationship with Washington, but recently it intensified its anti-American campaign. Just days after Secretary of State talked to President Ilham Aliyev last month about media/civil society crackdown, police raided/forcibly closed RFE/RL bureau in Baku. Some analysts are puzzled asking whether it was the very same government that wanted a strategic partnership with the US… What is your take on that?

A. It is remarkable that so many Op-Eds and editorials have appeared here in the US since Khadija’s detention and the closure of Radio Azadliq – most of them condemning the Aliyev government. But it is hardly the first time that major American news organizations have published this sort of thing. Both the New York Times and Washington Post (along with a number of British and European media groups) have been conspicuous in recent years in their exposés and critical assessments of Azerbaijan’s government. And the reaction from Baku has been predictable, with government figures often declaring that American newspapers take their orders from the White House. These expressions of indignation are soon followed by an anti-American diatribe, printed in some government press organ. (My all-time favorite was a long piece authored in 2011 by Bakhtiyar Sadikhov in the pages of Azerbaijan, the government newspaper that is all-too-happy to publish any anti-American screed. The article, which examined a variety of American misadventures since the end of the Second World War, was vastly entertaining.)

What I want to stress is the bedrock first principle in the minds of certain Azerbaijani policy makers that the press in America is simply a mouthpiece for the US government. This assumption, which is never examined, simply has to be accepted as factual since in Azerbaijan, virtually all major press organizations actually are controlled—directly or indirectly—by the government or the major oligarchs. It’s a classic case of projection. The concept of a free press is for these people simply a joke that is shared by the power structure in Azerbaijan – and by extension by the elites in any western country.  

So it follows that if major American newspapers are vectors of US foreign policy and are waging a propaganda war against President Aliyev, then naturally so are Congressionally funded NGOs as well as the OSCE. Taken in this context, the RFE/RL Baku bureau actually is an insidious fifth column, dedicated to bringing down the Aliyev government.

And it follows that continuing scrutiny of the president and his closest associates by RFE/RL looks like a betrayal. After all, if you have a strategic partnership with someone, you expect a certain degree of latitude. And that’s precisely what the Department of State and successive administrations have given the Aliyev government, despite President Obama mentioning Azerbaijan’s human rights record in September in his remarks at the Clinton Global Initiative.

The Aliyev government simply cannot understand why the US would offer up any criticism since they believe that the partnership grants them a high level of immunity. When the American press slams President Aliyev, the perception is that the terms of the partnership have been violated. So they react.

Q. Some analysts draw attention to the end of "balanced foreign policy" in Azerbaijan, and so the new era begins in the U.S.-Azerbaijan relations. In his recent article Richard Kauzlarich, a former U.S. Ambassador, also highlighted that when the Heydar Aliyev era ended so did the close U.S.-Azerbaijan relationship. Do you think that Azerbaijani authorities blackmail U.S. because of the rapprochement with Moscow?

A. We need to shed some delusions about this nadir in U.S.-Azerbaijani relations before we can unravel it. Firstly, it's not about Russia. I hear the Russian thesis so often from Azeri friends that I wonder if somehow we are talking about two different things. While it is true that Russia may be delighted by the downturn in relations between Baku and Washington, there is nothing to indicate that the Kremlin is driving this train or even that Baku is suddenly basking in the warm embrace of Moscow. We can certainly expect that President Putin will do everything he can to take advantage of the situation by reaching out to Aliyev, but President Aliyev and his foreign minister Elmar Mammadyarov weren’t born yesterday, and have a vital interest in keeping the Kremlin at arm’s reach – irrespective of what Ramiz Mehdiyev might prefer. I think that overall, the Russian angle has been overstated.

Secondly, it is not about Karabakh. I keep hearing that Azeri frustration over the US not solving its Karabakh problem is a component in the sudden souring of relations. The heightened tensions along the Line of Contact are certainly troubling, and I do think that there are signals from Baku that they consider the OSCE Minsk Group’s involvement to be of diminishing value. But impatience over the negotiating process does not begin to account for the crackdown on dissent and the angry outbursts from Ramiz Mehdiyev and others in positions of power.

What I do think is salient are two things: the palpable sense of fear at the highest levels of government and the long-term effort of Ilham Aliyev to cement the power structure in such a way that it is invulnerable.

I won’t elaborate on the fear element since I’ve written about it at length elsewhere. Suffice it to say that a very real sense of fear drives the Azerbaijani government to an irrational degree. The great tragedy of modern Azerbaijan is that a talented cadre of thinkers who could add tremendous value to political discourse in Azerbaijan’s development are being rounded up and treated like common criminals out of a paranoid fear of a Maidan or Syrian style insurgency. As Talleyrand supposedly said long ago, “It’s worse than a crime – it’s a waste!”

What Americans don’t seem to understand is that what we have been seeing recently is nothing terribly extraordinary. Rather, the closure of the RFE/RL bureau and the latest arrests represent the finishing touches to a multi-year program.

Let me describe President Aliyev’s program in this way. We have a joke in America, which is popular with fourth-graders that goes something like this…

Q: How do you carve a statue of an elephant?

A: Get a block of granite and chip away everything that doesn’t look like an elephant!

And that’s what President Aliyev has been doing since he took office in 2003. He’s been chipping away—sometimes slowly and methodically, sometimes with great vigor—at everything that doesn’t look like the perfect modern sultanate, the features of which include fake elections, a fake judiciary and a fake free press. And the problem is that he thought he had an understanding with the US and Europe that he could pretty well carry out his project however he liked. So when he is the subject of unflattering Op-Eds and investigative pieces in the American press or scrutinized by US-funded media organizations, he feels personally betrayed.

Part of the problem can be laid at the doorstep of Washington, since the Obama administration has been rather ambivalent about its relations with Baku, not being able to make up its mind as to what the preferred strategy is. The result has been at least one long gap with no ambassador, and what looks like a rather half-hearted effort to bring up the human rights angle with the occasional symbolic gesture. That doesn’t send a very clear message, and has led to confusion in Baku.

One interesting aspect of all this drama is that both President Aliyev and the Foreign Minister have been relatively silent since Ramiz Mehdiyev’s essay was published and the RFE/RL office shut down.

Q. Why is this “interesting”?

A. Well, for one thing, I doubt that many career professionals in the Foreign Ministry are comfortable at all with what’s been happening recently. Nor am I one of those people who assume that the highest levels of decision-making in Azerbaijan are “monolithic.” It’s perfectly possible that one of Ramiz Mehdiyev’s motives for writing his polemic was to reassert influence in the twilight of his career. He’s 76 years old, and some analysts in Baku stress that his alliance with President Aliyev is built on dividing up their respective financial and political empires and little else.

Let me just quote a 2009 Wikileaks cable before I close. In the dispatch, the author (possibly Donald Lu or more likely a senior political officer at the embassy) discusses Mehdiyev and his role in what looks all too familiar today, nearly six years later:

“We do see Mehdiyev's fingerprints all over the arrests of journalists, the stifling of opposition leaders, the closure of mosques, the restrictions on the media and the general law-and-order approach to governance.  Is he the puppet or the puppet-master?  At age 71 and often seen in frail health, this is an increasingly important question.”  
 

Alakbar Raufoglu

Washington, DC