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REGION: Iran urges Azerbaijan to move closer

BAKU: Iranian President Mohammad Khatami, on his first official visit to Iran’s pro-Western neighbour Azerbaijan Thursday, said the two Muslim countries had a historic obligation to move closer together.

Tehran is known to be unhappy about the Western orientation chosen by Azerbaijan, an oil-rich former Soviet republic on Iran’s northern border, and is also uneasy about a growing US military presence in the country.

After several hours of talks in the Azeri capital between Khatami and Azerbaijan’s President Ilham Aliyev, the Iranian leader made no public mention of any discord but hinted that relations could be better. “History and geography have tied our fates together,” Khatami, the first Iranian leader to visit Azerbaijan since 1993, told reporters at a press conference. “That puts a big responsibility on us to move closer in the future. We have a common culture and religion. Our borders make our security a shared concern.”

Khatami added: “The Iran-Azerbaijan border is a border of peace and friendship. We consider the security of Azerbaijan as important as our own. Both leaders have a strong will to develop relations.” According to analysts, Azerbaijan is caught in the middle of a tussle between Iran and the United States for influence in the strategically-important region around the Caspian Sea.

In recent months, the Pentagon has been ramping up its military assistance to Azerbaijan, which, like Iran, has a Caspian shoreline. The US military has run joint exercises with the Azeri navy in the Caspian.

Senior US defence officials say they now want to begin a training programme for Azeri troops and also use military facilities in Azerbaijan as bases for any future deployment of US forces in the region. Washington says its military presence is designed to help protect Azerbaijan’s oil infrastructure.

The US is backing a major project to export Azeri oil from the Caspian Sea - home to some of the world’s biggest untapped oil and gas reserves - to international markets. But Iran is suspicious of US motives, particularly after President George W. Bush described the country as part of an “axis of evil” following the September 11 attacks. “For Iran... the participation of the (United States) in the fate of the Caspian region is a very sensitive issue,” said Rashad Rzaquliyev, an analyst in Azerbaijan’s capital, Baku. For its part, Azerbaijan is pressing Iran for a solution to a long-running dispute over maritime borders in the Caspian Sea. afp

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