Vol. 1, No. 12 (July 15, 2008)

Democracy and security in Azerbaijan: An American view

Stephen Blank, Prof.
Strategic Study Institute
US Army War College 
 

Virtually every analysis of security in the South Caucasus links the region’s precarious situation in one way or another to the incompletion or absence of democracy there.  While none of the three South Caucasian states is totalitarian, it is clear that they all suffer from quite visible democratic deficits.  And these deficits are particularly aggravated during presidential and parliamentary elections.  The recent Georgian and Armenian presidential elections underscored the fragility of both democratic practices and of internal security in those states.  Indeed, the explosion of unrest in both countries due to allegedly undemocratic elections showed once again quite clearly hat it is the failure to advance democracy that is a fundamental structural “detonator” of unrest in the region and throughout the CIS.  In view of the fact that Azerbaijan has upcoming presidential elections, foreign and particularly American concern about the prospects of violence and disorder in the state have now become a matter of the public record.
 
This forthrightly expressed concern clashes with that of Azerbaijan’s government.  Ramiz Mehdiyev, chief of presidential apparatus, has stated that there is no force capable of upsetting stability in the country and that nobody will be strong enough to do in Azerbaijan what happened in Armenia, [1] where the government forcibly suppressed protesters after the recent election.  While he may be right, recent history suggests that such statements may be rash and in some cases amount to whistling by the graveyard.  US secretary of state Rice’s public expression of concern about the status of democracy in Azerbaijan therefore created considerable irritation in official Azerbaijani circles.  These circles are also offended by the fact that the United States has provided funding to help support the conduct of the upcoming (October, 2008) presidential elections.  Those funds will be spent on boosting the activity of political parties, improving the election system, backing up efforts to monitor the elections, and on broadcasting debates in both the U.S. and Azerbaijan, and on overseeing the election results and on training policemen to guard the integrity of the elections.  These allocations are consistent with U.S. policy elsewhere in the CIS and other countries and emphatically do not represent an effort to sponsor one or another candidate.  Rather they are an attempt to enhance the likelihood of an open, fair, and free election.
 
Nevertheless and quite predictably these programs have triggered the anger of Azerbaijani officials who regard it as an open US intervention in Azerbaijan’s domestic politics, and as demonstrating an American “bias” against Azerbaijan.  Allegedly its program also signifies Washington’s belief that Azerbaijan is supposedly more backward than other countries and cannot be trusted to conduct its own elections fairly, and as raising or evincing America’s supposedly habitual inclinations to adopt “double standards” vis-à-vis other states’ elections.  It should not be lost on Azerbaijani audiences that such remarks and criticisms duplicate quite literally the attacks made in Moscow against US policy and Russia’s ongoing campaign to misrepresent and discredit American support for democracy abroad.  But as Ambassador Anne Derse observed, given what occurred in Armenia and Georgia and the current state of the Azerbaijani polity, unfortunately Washington’s concern that something untoward might happen in Baku is by no means misplaced.  If anything, its program to fund election processes is an attempt to ensure that nothing of the sort occurs in Azerbaijan and that its president is elected in an open and legitimate manner, an outcome that could only strengthen the new president’s legitimacy and stability of the country as a whole.
 
These criticisms of US policy are hardly new or unexpected but they miss the point.  If the president is elected amidst widespread charges of a corrupt election and fraud, or worse, violence, his tenure and Azerbaijan’s security will be compromised from the start and quite possibly he will not be able to finish his term without resorting to the kind of repression and violence we have recently seen in Armenia.  Nobody can plausibly argue that Armenia has become more stable as a result of its rejection of the criticisms of its election process.  Indeed, the regime’s base there has become narrower and self-serving and popular discontent will not likely be contained easily.  Although one cannot call Azerbaijan’s regime a full-fledged democracy, the upcoming presidential election does give it a chance to move forward along that trajectory.  By doing so it will enhance its ability to stand on its own in a region surrounded by Iran and Russia and to enhance its role as an independent energy provider to Europe and as a state that ultimately can move towards joining Europe and fulfilling the requirements of doing so over time.     

Therefore, while the criticisms about US policy are not surprising, they are shortsighted and myopic.  It is highly unlikely that anyone in the Azerbaijani elite wishes to see a repeat of what happened in Tbilisi and Yerevan take place in Baku.  But if they spurn the opportunity to endow the upcoming presidential elections with those attributes of openness, honesty, and most of all legitimacy, then such an outcome is all too likely.  Given Azerbaijan’s precarious security situation and the strong link between democratic deficits and weakened security, undermining the legitimacy of any future Azerbaijani government or its stability, is hardly calculated to move Azerbaijan’s security forward. 

* The views expressed in this article do not in any way represent those of the US Army, Defense Department, or the US Government. 


Note

[1]  http://www.regnum.ru/news/1000259.html.