Foreign Correspondence

[Amaunet]

Azerbaijan ready to host US forces

Washington has targeted Azerbaijan for takeover. It would seem that Ilham Aliyev by accepting the US base is desperately trying to hold on to his presidency. Although there is no guarantee that even if Azerbaijan becomes a good little American colony and gives in to all of Bush's demands Washington will back off.


Reference:
It has been suggested that Western governments wanted to promote democratization in Azerbaijan out of a desire to protect the considerable investment made in the pipeline. That is only a part of the strategic game, however. The other part is what Pentagon strategists term "strategic denial".

Until recently the US had supported the corrupt ruthless dictatorship of the Aliyev's as the family had played ball with US geopolitical designs in the area, even though Haider Aliyev had been a career top KGB officer in the Soviet Mikhail Gorbachev era. Then on April 12, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld went to Baku, his second visit in four months, to discuss demands to create a US military base in Azerbaijan, as part of the US global force redeployment involving Europe, the Mideast and Asia.
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-Am

Azerbaijan ready to host US forces

* The country will discuss the possiblility of transferring US airbase from Uzbekistan

MOSCOW: Azerbaijan is close to agreement with the United States on the establishment of a US military presence following the eviction of American forces from Uzbekistan, a Russian newspaper said on Wednesday.

“A decision wanted by Washington has almost ripened,” the Nezavisimaya Gazeta newspaper quoted an unnamed source close to the Azerbaijani foreign ministry as saying.

The president of the strategic Caspian country, Ilham Aliyev, “in the end will give his agreement to the deployment in the country of an American military contingent,” the source said.

Azerbaijani Foreign Minister Elmar Mamedyarov, who has been in Washington since Monday, would meet Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice to discuss the possible US deployment on Wednesday, the newspaper said.

Mamedyarov would be holding talks at the Pentagon at which the main theme would be “not only general prospects for military cooperation but an extremely concrete question – the possibility of transferring the American base from Uzbekistan to Azerbaijan,” the newspaper said, summarising the views of unnamed analysts.

Nezavisimaya Gazeta cited a source in the Azerbaijani security forces as saying that a team of US military instructors was already in Azerbaijan looking at two possible sites for hosting the US military, one close to the capital Baku and the other close to the border with Iran.

The former Soviet republic of Azerbaijan could represent a highly strategic location for US forces, in part because it borders Iran – one of the countries named by US President George W Bush in his first term as forming an “axis of evil”.

The Caspian Sea region is being developed as a major alternative to Middle Eastern oil sources and is therefore considered by some analysts as a potential terrorist target.

But Moscow has been angered by the growing US presence in a region long seen as Russia’s sphere of influence, particularly as the United States has been helping to train the military of the neighbouring former Soviet republic of Georgia. afp

http://www.dailytimes.com.pk/default.asp?page=story_4-8-2005_pg4_16