Turkey, ethnicity, and oil in the caucasus

INTRODUCTION

For most of its history, the Ottoman Empire devoted much attention in foreign relations to the Russian Empire as did the Turkish Republic afterwards to the Soviet Union. While Turkey and post-Soviet Russia no longer share a common border nor the tensions of the Cold War, their relations have become somewhat more complicated with the emergence a decade ago of three independent states in Transcaucasis - Georgia, Armenia and Azerbaijan-in which they both have varying degrees of interest. These countries of what Russia calls the "near abroad" are all members of the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS)-although Georgia refused to join until October 1993, while Azerbaijan withdrew from October 1992 to September 1993. Orthodox Christian Armenia, the smallest state in Transcaucasia and the only one of the three that does not share a border with Russia, has the closest ties with Moscow as well as Russian troops stationed on its borders with Turkey and Iran, although its president, Robert Kocharian, unlike counterparts in Georgia (Eduard Shevardnadze) and Azerbaijan (Haydar Aliyev) is not a former Communist official.

Turkey and Armenia distrust one another because of previous history. During the latter years of the Ottoman Empire, its eastern provinces became the scene of massive deportations and killings of Armenians, whose population's loyalty was regarded with suspicion by authorities; several decades later, during the mid-1970s through the mid-1980s, Armenian terrorists targeted Turkish diplomats and institutions. As for Turkic Azerbaijan, it has an ethnic and religious affinity with Turkey-although its Muslim population is predominantly Shi'i rather Sunni-as well as a shared distrust of the Armenians. Both it and Orthodox Christian Georgia-despite a religious affinity with its northern neighbor and the presence of Russian troops on its soil-are suspicious of the intentions of Russia, whom they have accused of interfering in their respective internal politics and of aiding minority insurrections. (That is to say, the Armenians of Nagorno-Karabakh in the case of Azerbaijan and the Abkhazians in the case of Georgia. Indeed, the latter involvement supposedly came to an end with Georgia granting Russia military bases.) Also, they greatly value economic ties with Turkey (and along with Armenia have developed trade with Iran.) This paper will focus on Turkey's interest in and actions toward the states of Transcaucasia, especially Azerbaijan, and how these matters affect Turco-Russian relations. With the possible exception of Azerbaijan, with whom its relations are also seen as part of a policy toward Turkic Central Asia, Turkey regards the Caucasus as a "buffer zone," while Russia sees the region as a "forward base."1 Indeed, both have political, economic, and security interests in the region, but for Russia memories of empire are still quite clear while for Turkey there is an awakening of cultural ties with Azerbaijan.

TURKEY AND AZERBAIJAN

In an article in The Economist of London in mid-1992, the correspondent based in Baku, Azerbaijan's capital, began with the following words:

Under an advertisement of Turkiye Is Bank, the customers of the Ozal cafe sip thick black coffee and read Hurriyet. Close your eyes. The heat and the language suggest Turkey. Yet the sea, with its oil rigs glittering in the distance is the Caspian.2

While only sharing a border of some seven miles with Azerbaijan's enclave of Nakhichevan-a territory which also borders Armenia and Iran-the Turks and Azerbaijanis (Azeris) are quite close culturally. (In November 1991, the Azerbaijani parliament passed a law replacing Cyrillic with the Roman alphabet, becoming the first-Uzbekistan followed in July 1994-Turkic former Soviet republic to do so.)3 Even before the collapse of the Soviet Union, Turkey was able to further develop those cultural ties along with the establishment of economic relations, including an air link to Baku; and in March 1991, the late Turkish President Turgut Ozal made a state visit to Azerbaijan.4 In early November of the same year, following a visit to Ankara by the then Azerbaijani Prime Minister Hasan Hasanov, Turkey became the first state to recognize Azerbaijan's independence. Two months later, the Turkish government announced that it was opening an embassy in Baku, once again the first to do so.5 (It should be noted that it was not until mid-December 1991 that Turkey recognized all the other republics-including Armenia-that made up the Soviet Union; and by the spring of the following year, Turkish embassies were open in all the capitals of the Turkic states of Central Asia.) Azerbaijan responded enthusiastically to Turkey's gestures of friendship, though the relationship cooled off somewhat since the June 1993 coup which removed Azerbaijan's pro-Turkish president, Ebulfez Elcibey, from power.

Elcibey, who was elected president of Azerbaijan in June 1992 emphasized, at the time, to a correspondent of the Moscow News, his country's "special ethnic relations" with Turkey: "Our people are close in language, culture and mentality. Of course, Turkey will enjoy pride of place in Azerbaijan's foreign policy."6 And a few months later, in another interview, he elaborated: "We are like Turkey. We are between Europe and Asia. We are striving for a secular society, but the Islamic factor is also present here." Elcibey also called Iran a "regime based on fanaticism" and depicted his counterpart in Armenia, Levon Ter-Petrosyan-a fellow academic and a leading member of the Karabakh Committee when the war between Armenia and Azerbaijan began in 1988-"as a potential partner in peace talks," but did not feel that the Armenian president was able to control "radical forces around him:' who were rejecting any compromise on the issue of Nagorno-Karabakh.7 (That region, a predominantly Armenian-populated enclave located within Azerbaijan was the cause of a war in which it was estimated, as of mid-1994 when a ceasefire took effect, that more than 15,000 people lost their lives and over one million Azeris were forced to flee their homes.)8 Yet Elcibey, who eventually held discussions with Ter-Petrosyan for the first and only time at Turkish President Turgut Ozal's funeral in April 1993, in response to a U.S.-Russian-Turkish peace initiative, had his own nationalist reputation, and within his cabinet there were "hardliners" as well. Indeed, there were claims that Elcibey's broad based political party, the Popular Front, received substantial funding from Alparslan Turkes, a Turkish pan-Turkic leader who, in the 1970s, founded the ultranationalist Gray Wolves paramilitary organization that was responsible for a number of political assassinations in Turkey.9