By Anar Valiyev
On December 10, media
outlets reported that Russia will end its use of the Gabala Radar Station,
located on Azerbaijan’s territory. The Azerbaijani Ministry of Foreign Affairs stated
that following intensive negotiations over Gabala, the two sides were unable to
reach an agreement on leasing fees. The Russian Interfax agency cited an anonymous
diplomatic source who contended that the Russian withdrawal from Gabala would
not negatively affect relations between Russia and Azerbaijan (Interfax,
December 10).
The Head of the
External Relations Department in Azerbaijan’s presidential administration, Novruz
Mammadov, stressed that the Russian withdrawal from Gabala will have no
negative impact on bilateral relations. He made it clear that the reason for
the closure was financial and not political in nature. Concerning the future of
the radar station, Mammadov said that the surrounding Gabala region is a center
of tourism. It is, therefore, possible that the military installation will
generally be eliminated and ruled out the possibility of leasing the Gabala
radar to some other country (Trend, December 11). Arastun Orujlu, the head of
the Baku-based East-West think tank, believes that Azerbaijan was not the initiator
of the Russian withdrawal. Most probably, Russia received guarantees that the
site will not be leased to anyone else (Contact.az, December 11).
Uzeir Jafarov,
a Baku-based military expert argues that the Gabala station has no practical
use for Azerbaijan from a military perspective, while the environmental damage caused
by its continued use was high. Therefore, the termination of this site should
be considered a positive political decision (Contact.az, December 11). However,
he expects that the closure of Gabala will, in fact, lead to a deterioration of
bilateral relations. Jafarov maintains that Gabala has little military value for
Azerbaijan and Baku lacks human resources for its operations. Today, Armenia
represents the major threat for Azerbaijan, but the country’s air defense
system currently in place is able to successfully repulse possible Armenian air
strikes without further assistance from the Gabala station. Political analyst
Eldar Namazov agrees on this point, adding that the low rent being charged for
Russia’s continued use of the site made it uneconomical for Azerbaijan to maintain
it. However, Namazov also believes that Moscow’s loss of its military presence
in Azerbaijan will negatively impact bilateral diplomatic and political relations.
Time will tell how negative these consequences will be, he believes (Contact.az,
December 11).
Other
political experts have more openly argued that Russia will take revenge for its
forced withdrawal from Azerbaijan. Political observer and journalist Rauf
Mirkadirov, writing the Zerkalo newspaper on December 11, asserted that
Azerbaijan should expect provocations from Russia. He even compared the current
situation in Azerbaijan with the situation in Georgia prior to the
Russian-Georgian war in 2008, when seven months before the war, the last
echelon of Russian military equipment left Georgia. Moreover, he added, with
the Russian withdrawal from Azerbaijan, the significance of Armenia as the only
Russian satellite in the Caucasus would increase (Zerkalo, December 11).
Notably, the
Russian-Azerbaijani failure to come to an agreement on Gabala came at a point
when relations between the two countries are experiencing hard times—as
illustrated by the Azerbaijani president’s boycott of the Commonwealth of
Independent States (CIS) summit in Ashgabat this month (see EDM, December, 14).
The next couple of months will clarify how the Russian withdrawal will affect
relations between Moscow and Baku.
