Over two months have passed since Moscow's surprise proposal for joint use of Azerbaijan's Gabala radar station with the United States. Trilateral talks are scheduled for Baku in early September, with follow-up discussions between Russia and the US to be held in Moscow. But despite the activity, some local Azerbaijani analysts now contend that the chances are slim that Gabala will ever be used as part of a shared US-Russian missile defense system.
Azerbaijan initially supported Russian President Vladimir Putin's June proposal, subject to Baku's participation in all consultations. [For details, see the Eurasia Insight archive]. The offer, however, made at the G8 summit in Germany, has still apparently failed to gain strong American support.
Yet, although the United States has stated that it will not give up on plans to build an anti-missile shield in Poland and the Czech Republic, it has not held back on diplomatic activity over the Russian proposal. Several rounds of bilateral talks on the issue have already taken place this summer.
On August 10, in one of the most recent US commentaries, Assistant Secretary of State for European and Eurasian Affairs Daniel Fried termed Putin's proposal "interesting." "The best solution would be to combine this proposal with the idea of establishing anti-missile systems in Poland and the Czech Republic and to establish [a] single and transparent system that would increase common security," Fried said, Azertag news agency reported.
Meanwhile, the consultations continue. A group of Azerbaijani, Russian and American scientists, diplomats and military officials will visit Gabala "in the near future" to analyze the possibilities for joint station use, Azerbaijani Foreign Minister Elmar Mammadyarov said to journalists in Baku on August 15. The trip, proposed by Moscow, will mark the first time US officials have been allowed to visit the station.
Use of the radar station was a central topic during Russian-Azerbaijani security consultations in Baku in late July, but, according to Mammadyarov, did not feature in recent discussions between Iranian President Mahmoud Akhmadinejad and President Ilham Aliyev during the latter's August 21-22 official visit to Azerbaijan.
Yet Iran has made its view clear. "The joint use of Gabala radar station may threaten Azerbaijan's independence and territorial integrity," Iranian Ambassador to Baku Nasir Hamidi Zari told an August 20 press conference. "The Azerbaijani leadership and people should be more concerned with this issue than Iran."
Togrul Juvarly, a political analyst with the pro-opposition Turan news agency, believes that Iran's show of indifference indicates that Tehran "understands that so far it is just diplomatic maneuvers. Otherwise, Tehran would take a serious demarche against Russia."
Former Azerbaijani presidential foreign policy advisor Vafa Guluzade believes that Iran is more concerned with US-Azerbaijani security cooperation than with any discussion about Gabala.
"It is clear that Russia and the US will not come to an agreement on joint use of the station. The Americans do not really need this out-of-date radar," Guluzade commented. "They are already able to monitor Iranian territory via the new radar installed in Astara [a southern region that borders on Iran] in 2006. The Russians do not need the station anymore, either."
A recent statement by Colonel General Vladimir Popovkin, commander of Russia's Space Forces, appears in line with that prediction. Upon completion of a new radar station in 2007 in the southern Russian city of Armavir, Russia may back out of using radar stations located abroad, he said.
"The Space Forces are planning to refuse using radar stations located outside of Russia in the near future because we do not want the country's defense capacity to depend on foreign countries," Popovkin said on August 23, Interfax reported. He specified that Russia may give up use of radar stations in Ukraine, Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan and Belarus.
Azerbaijani Reserve Army General Vladimir Timishenko, a Baku-based military expert, believes that those statements are on the mark. Russia will not renew its lease for Gabala once it expires in 2012, he predicted. "The station in Armavir will be able to make up for Russia's leaving from Gabala," Timishenko said. "The new station will be modern and have higher technical parameters [than Gabala]."
Even so, whether Gabala ever materializes or not, the debate over the station's pros and cons has benefits for Azerbaijan, some observers believe. Commented analyst Juvarly: "[I]t increases the country's international weight."
Editor's note:
Rovshan Ismayilov is a freelance journalist based in Baku.
