At first glance, it doesn’t add up; why is Azerbaijan, a country brimming with oil and gas, interested in developing nuclear power capacity?

It’s a question befuddling local experts and environmental activists in Baku. But the questions don’t stop there. Under a May 8 executive order, Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev has given [...]]]> by Shahin Abbasov

At first glance, it doesn’t add up; why is Azerbaijan, a country brimming with oil and gas, interested in developing nuclear power capacity?

It’s a question befuddling local experts and environmental activists in Baku. But the questions don’t stop there. Under a May 8 executive order, Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev has given responsibility for the nuclear project not to the Ministry of Energy or the Ministry of Industry and Economy, but to the Ministry of Communications and High Technologies, specifically, to a National Center for Nuclear Research that is answerable to the ministry.

The executive order stressed that Azerbaijan’s nuclear capabilities would be “for peaceful purposes,” according to Azerbaijani news outlets.

Work on the nuclear project is slated to begin by the end of 2014, with a hoped-for completion date “within three to four years,” Communications Minister Ali Abbasov announced on his ministry’s website May 13. Abbasov did not specify the cost of the project or the scale of the future power plant, though he referred to the construction of “several nuclear reactors.”

In 2008, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) issued to Azerbaijan a preliminary agreement for construction of a single 10-15-megawatt nuclear reactor for research purposes. Baku has not yet formally applied to the IAEA for an agreement about additional reactors.

The nuclear facility would be situated on a plot of government-owned land 15 kilometers north of the capital, Baku.

Abbasov, a 61-year-old native of President Aliyev’s ancestral Nakhchivan region with a doctorate in microelectronics and a passion for digital IT, has no experience in nuclear energy. Nor, for that matter, do any of his deputies.

Baku’s interest in developing nuclear power dates back to the Soviet era. Those plans were mothballed amid the 1991 collapse of the Soviet Union, as well as Azerbaijan’s involvement in a prolonged conflict with Armenia over the Nagorno-Karabakh enclave.

France, which generates over three-quarters of its energy from nuclear power and already has longtime energy ties with the Aliyev administration, apparently senses an opportunity.

During his May 12 trip to Baku, French President François Hollande mentioned that unspecified French companies are willing to work with the Azerbaijani government on the construction of a nuclear-power plant. Earlier, Abbasov had named VINCI Construction Grands Projets, one of the world’s largest builders of mega-infrastructure facilities, as among the French concerns interested in getting involved in the nuclear project.

Some local economic experts question the logic behind Azerbaijan “going nuclear.”

The country’s economic growth rate is relatively brisk; the Asian Development Bank projects up to 5 percent growth for 2014. Economist Natik Jafarly believes that oil-and-gas-rich Azerbaijan already has the energy and electricity it needs to keep its economy going strong.

According to official data, Azerbaijan in 2013 consumed 20.6 billion kWt/h of electricity out of a production supply of 21.5 billion kWt/h. The extra supply was exported to neighboring Georgia and Russia.

Azerbaijan, though, does not produce uranium or nuclear fuel, and would have to look for exporters. “It will make Azerbaijan dependent on uranium price-changes and also politically dependent [on exporting countries],” argued Jafarly, head of the non-governmental Society of Economic Bloggers. The government has not named any possible sources for such uranium supplies.

Other experts believe that the plant will not generate power. In February 2012, the director of Azerbaijan’s National Academy of Sciences’ Institute for Radiation Problems, Adil Garibov, told ANS TV that the government would build a reactor strictly for research purposes, including the production of isotopes for use in medical treatments. Garibov added that his institute had hired 16 young physicists who were being trained at nuclear centers abroad for such tasks.

Whatever the project’s purpose, environmentalist Farida Huseynova, head of the Greens Movement of Azerbaijan, believes that the 2011 Fukushima and 1986 Chernobyl nuclear disasters show that the dangers of nuclear power outweigh the benefits for a country like Azerbaijan. “Supporters of this project say that Azerbaijani scientists will get the chance to conduct nuclear research. However, there are very few such nuclear physicists in Azerbaijan and they could do their research in other countries,” Huseynova said.

Rather than nuclear power, building up alternative energy resources well suited to Azerbaijan’s climate and geography — hydropower, solar power or wind power – would be preferable, she underlined. Jafarly agreed, noting the contradiction with the Azerbaijani government’s long-term demand that neighboring Armenia close its 38-year-old Metsamor plant, currently the only nuclear facility in the South Caucasus, because of its regional environmental risk.

“Since Baku consistently demands the closure of the Armenian plant, it is not clear why the government wants to create a new threat on its own territory,” Jafarly said.

As yet, government officials have not commented publicly on the nuclear project.

– Shahin Abbasov is a freelance correspondent based in Baku.

Photo: Oil- and natural gas-rich Azerbaijan has hinted it may be interested in developing nuclear energy capabilities. While a preliminary agreement only allows for a 10- to 15-megawatt facility, the government has not disclosed the scale of a project slated to start construction by the end of 2014. Credit: Tennessee Valley Authority

* This article was first published by EurasiaNet and was reprinted here with permission.

The brewing rapprochement between the United States and Iran, signified by the Geneva nuclear deal signed in January, seems likely to scramble American strategic priorities in the South Caucasus, especially for Azerbaijan.

In recent years, the United States deemphasized democratization in its dealings with Azerbaijan on account of Baku’s strategic position as [...]]]> by Richard Kauzlarich 

The brewing rapprochement between the United States and Iran, signified by the Geneva nuclear deal signed in January, seems likely to scramble American strategic priorities in the South Caucasus, especially for Azerbaijan.

In recent years, the United States deemphasized democratization in its dealings with Azerbaijan on account of Baku’s strategic position as Iran’s northern neighbour, a position that made it a key cog in the West’s containment policy against Tehran. But now that the United States — along with other permanent members of the United Nations Security Council, plus Germany – are taking the first steps toward re-establishing a working relationship with Iran, the justification for Washington’s tolerance of Baku rights abuses is starting to recede.

The Joint Action Plan, also known as the Geneva interim agreement, is designed to roll back aspects of Iran’s controversial nuclear program in exchange for limited sanctions relief. This deal is seen as a stepping stone to a comprehensive pact that ensures the exclusively peaceful nature of Iran’s nuclear program. Prior to reaching agreement, the nuclear standoff had prompted increasingly tight US-led sanctions against Iran, and raised the prospects of military action.

If developments now unfold as envisioned, the regional order in the Middle East and Caspian Basin could turn upside down. Diplomatic normalization would certainly change the region’s existing energy-export calculus. Since the Islamic revolution of 1979 and the ensuing diplomatic break with Tehran, the exclusion of Iran from regional security plans and energy-related projects has been a permanent feature of American policy.

Many regional players have come to see opposition to Iran and alignment with the United States as strategically beneficial for them. Azerbaijan is a case in point. Since it gained independence in 1991, Baku has sought the West’s support to achieve its overriding national objective: regaining control over the separatist territory of Nagorno-Karabakh. Striving to burnish its pro-Western credentials, Baku was happy to accommodate the United States by excluding Iran from Western-led energy consortia and the regional pipelines that bring Caspian oil and gas to the world markets. US laws forbidding US companies to partner with Iranian entities made that a necessity.

Establishing a partnership with NATO and developing close security cooperation with Israelhelped bolster Baku’s strategic importance for Washington: Lots of experts speculated that Azerbaijan could emerge as a forward operating area for military operations, in the event of a US and/or Israeli strike against Iran. In exchange, President Ilham Aliyev’s administration expected, and mostly got, the West to turn a blind eye to its authoritarian governing practices, especially its muzzling of a free press and its crackdown on political dissent.

The Geneva interim agreement challenges existing arrangements. Not only the probability of a military strike is fading, but also the rise of Sunni jihadist groups in Syria, Iraq, Lebanon and elsewhere in the Middle East is pushing the US and Shi’a Iran towards at least some sort of tacit cooperation — even without waiting for a final agreement on the nuclear issue. While a full-fledged strategic realignment is still far off, there is an obvious convergence of interests in countering the Al-Qaeda-type groups, and, at least in Iraq, some behind-the-scenes cooperation seems already to be occurring.

In this context, emphasising Azerbaijan’s anti-Iranian credentials as a strategic asset for the United States, as some American neoconservative pundits do, is counter-productive to US national security interests. Previously, few questioned those promoting a “strategic” alliance with Azerbaijan to counter Iran. Former Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s war-mongering rhetoric and actions made it easy for anyone in Washington to be an unquestioning backer of Baku. But a more moderate Iranian incumbent, President Hassan Rouhani, now makes it far harder to argue that Iran is a perpetual enemy of the United States and a threat to Western interests.

For its part, Azerbaijan is unlikely to welcome a possible US-Iranian rapprochement. As it is, Azerbaijan is facing an uncertain future as an energy supplier. The shale gas boom in North America and declining demand in Europe threaten the profitability of Azerbaijani energy resources and pipeline projects. Iran’s potential re-emergence as a global energy player could seriously choke Azerbaijan’s existing revenue streams, as investors could easily find Tehran a more appealing option than Baku.

While Aliyev’s administration might not be happy about recent developments, there is little it can do to derail them. Unlike Israel and Saudi Arabia, Azerbaijan has no leverage to publicly oppose the rapprochement between the US and Iran without paying a steep price in terms of its relations with Washington. And sitting back and quietly hoping that Israel can torpedo the deal, as seems to be the preference of some policymakers in Baku, is probably not a winning strategy. The Obama-Kerry team has shown that it is determined to make the final agreement happen.

For Aliyev’s team, this means that it will have to find a different basis to articulate its strategic importance for the West. Changing geopolitical circumstances, especially if the nuclear deal places Iran on a more liberal domestic political trajectory, will make it much more difficult for the Azerbaijani government to justify its authoritarian tendencies.

The way to redefine the strategic partnership with the United States and EU would be for Azerbaijan to commit itself to shared values of democracy, human rights and the peaceful resolution of the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict. Such a commitment could pay some diplomatic dividends in itself, as the case of neighbouring Georgia has shown. And in the context of engagement with Iran, a democratizing Azerbaijan, with its mainly Shi’a Muslim population, would remain a strategic asset in Washington’s eyes.

Instead of seizing an opportunity, Baku is currently sending all the wrong messages: there are still dozens of political prisoners in Azerbaijan, including a former presidential candidate Ilgar Mammadov, and President Aliyev is maintaining a bellicose posture on the Karabakh question.

While the anti-Iranian rationale for the strategic partnership between the West and Azerbaijan is starting to crack, the Azerbaijani government is showing neither the vision nor the political will to redefine its strategic priorities. Failure to adjust could, sooner or later, render Azerbaijan geopolitically irrelevant.

– Richard Kauzlarich is a former US ambassador in Azerbaijan and is currently Adjunct Professor at the School of Public Policy, George Mason University.

*Originally published by Eurasianet

[While the terrible events in Egypt have delayed my plans to reply to ProPublica’s response to my critique of Sebastian Rotella’s report on the alleged build-up of Iran’s terrorist infrastructure in the Americas, Gareth Porter has written the following essay [...]]]> via LobeLog
by Gareth Porter

[While the terrible events in Egypt have delayed my plans to reply to ProPublica’s response to my critique of Sebastian Rotella’s report on the alleged build-up of Iran’s terrorist infrastructure in the Americas, Gareth Porter has written the following essay on a 2009 article by Rotella for the Los Angeles Times about an alleged bomb plot to blow up the Israeli Embassy in Baku, Azerbaijan, in 2008. It offers a very good illustration of some of the problems raised in my original critique of Rotella’s most recent work, notably the virtually exclusive reliance on sources that are clearly hostile to Iran with an interest in depicting it in the most negative light possible. But you be the judge. -- Jim Lobe]

It happened in Baku, transforming the capital of Azerbaijan into a battleground in a global shadow war.

Police intercepted a fleeing car and captured two suspected Hezbollah militants from Lebanon. The car contained explosives, binoculars, cameras, pistols with silencers and reconnaissance photos. Raiding alleged safe houses, police foiled what authorities say was a plot to blow up the Israeli Embassy in Azerbaijan, a former Soviet republic that borders Iran.

Thus begins the only detailed English-language press account of an alleged Iranian terror plot in Azerbaijan in 2008: a May 2009 article, written with a Paris dateline, by Sebastian Rotella for the Los Angeles Times.

But despite the sense of immediacy conveyed by his lede, Rotella’s sources for his account were not Azerbaijanis. Rather, the sources Rotella quoted on the details of the alleged plot, the investigation and apprehension of the suspects consisted of an unnamed “Israeli security official”, and Matthew Levitt, a senior fellow at the pro-Israel Washington Institute for Near East Policy (WINEP) and the author of a constant stream of articles, op-eds, and Congressional testimony reflecting the Israeli government’s interest in promoting the perception of a growing Iranian terrorist threat around the world.[1]

It was Levitt who described the alleged plot in Baku to Rotella as having been “in the advanced stages” when it was supposedly broken up by Azerbaijani security forces, an assertion echoed by the anonymous Israeli security official cited in the article:

 ”[Iran] had reached the stage where they had a network in place to do an operation,” said an Israeli security official, who requested anonymity for safety reasons. “We are seeing it all over the world. They are working very hard at it.”

So readers of the LA Times received a version of the plot that was filtered primarily, if not exclusively, through an Israeli lens.[2] Relying on Israeli officials and a close ally at a pro-Israel US think tank for a story on an alleged Iranian bomb plot against an Israeli Embassy is bound to produce a predictable story line where the accuracy can hardly be assumed at face value. Indeed, in this case, there were and remain many reasons for skepticism.

Yet, three years later, in a July 2012 article for ProPublica, he referred to the plot as though it was established fact.

Had Rotella sought an independent source in Azerbaijan, he would have learned, for example, that such alleged plots had been a virtual perennial in Baku for years. That is what a leading scholar of Azerbaijan’s external relations, Anar Valiyev, told me in an interview last November. “It’s always the same plot year after year,” said Valiyev, Dean of the School of International Affairs of the Azerbaijan Diplomatic Academy in Baku.

In fact, security officials in Azerbaijan had claimed the existence of a similar plot in October 2007 and January 2012 and only two months later, authorities arrested Azerbaijani suspects in two different allegedly Iranian-initiated plots to carry out terrorist actions against Western embassies, the Israeli Embassy and/or Jewish targets. In early 2013, prison sentences were announced in yet another alleged terrorist plot to attack the Eurovision song contest in Baku in 2012. Valiyev told me that those detained by Azerbaijani security officials are always charged with wanting to kill Israeli or US officials and subsequently tried for plots to overthrow the government, which carries the maximum sentence of 15 years in prison.

In a 2007 article in Jamestown Foundation’s Terrorism Focus, Valiyev observed that plots, assassination and coup-attempts were “thwarted” with regularity in Azerbaijan. “Periodically the government finds a scapegoat,” he wrote, to justify attacks on domestic critics, including “Wahabbis”, followers of Kurdish-Sunni scholar Said Nursi and/or Shiite radicals. Valiyev suggested that security officials might be “trying to show that radical Islamists could come to power…should the incumbent government lose the election.”

The Azerbaijani government and its security forces are not known for their devotion to the rule of law. The current president, Ilham Aliyev, is the son of Azerbaijan’s first president, Heydar Aliyev, who, in turn, was the head of the Soviet KGB before Azerbaijan’s independence. According to Jim Lobe, who visited Baku last year, dissidents regard the first Aliyev’s tenure as relatively liberal compared that of his son. A 2009 State Department cable described Ilham Aliyev as a “mafia-like” figure, likening him to a combination of Michael and Sonny Corleone in the “The Godfather”.

Valiyev observed that virtually nothing about the alleged plot made sense, beginning with the targets. According to Rotella’s story, the alleged Hezbollah operatives and their Azerbaijani confederates had planned to set off three or four car bombs at the Israeli Embassy simultaneously, using explosives they “intended to accumulate” in addition to the “hundreds of pounds of explosives” they had allegedly already acquired from “Iranian spies.”

But the Israeli Embassy is located in the seven-story Hyatt Tower office complex along with other foreign embassies, and no automobiles are allowed to park in close proximity to the complex, according to Valiyev. So the alleged plotters would have needed a prodigious amount of explosives to accomplish such a plan.

For example, the bomb that destroyed the eight-story US Air Force barracks at the Khobar Towers in Saudi Arabia in 1996 was estimated at 23,000 pounds of explosives detonated less than 100 feet away from the building. Valiyev told me that it is “practically impossible to find such components in Azerbaijan” because “Even a few kilograms of explosives would be tracked down by the ministry of national security.”

In his article, Rotella also referred — though only in passing — to the prosecutor’s charge that the alleged conspirators were planning to attack a Russian radar installation at Gabala (sometimes spelled Qabala) in northern Azerbaijan. But that part of the plot was also highly suspect, according to Valiyev. No reason was ever given for such a target, and it would have made no sense for either Hezbollah’s or Iran’s interests.

Built in 1984, the Gabala radar station was leased to the Russians until 2012, and 900 troops from the Russian Space Forces were stationed there. An attack on the station by Hezbollah or its supposed proxies in Azerbaijan would have represented a major provocation against Russia by Iran and Hezbollah, and was therefore hard to believe, as Valiyev pointed out in a July 2009 report for the Jamestown Foundation. Valiyev said it was far more plausible that the alleged plotters were simply carrying out surveillance on the station which, according to some reports, was being considered for possible integration into a regional US missile defense system.

Rotella failed to mention yet another aspect of the prosecution’s case that should arouse additional skepticism. The indictment included the charge that the leader of the alleged terrorist cell plotting these attacks was working simultaneously for Hezbollah and al-Qaeda. Even though it has been long been discredited, the idea of an Iran-al-Qaeda collaboration on terrorism has been a favorite Israeli theme for some time and one that continues to be propagated by Levitt.

Rotella’s account of how the suspects were apprehended also appears implausible. In May 2008, when the bombings were supposedly still weeks away, according to his story, the suspects realized they were under surveillance and tried to flee.

But instead of hiding or destroying incriminating evidence of their terrorist plot — such as the reconnaissance photos, the explosives, the cameras and the pistols with silencers — as might be expected under those circumstances, the two suspects allegedly packed all that equipment in their car and fled toward the border with Iran, whereupon they were intercepted, according to the official line reported by Rotella.

Somehow, despite the surveillance, according to anonymous “anti-terrorist officials” cited by Rotella, “a number of Lebanese, Iranian and Azerbaijani suspects escaped by car into Iran.” Only those with the incriminating evidence — including, most implausibly, hundreds of pounds of explosives — in their car were caught, according to the account given to Rotella.

Even Rotella’s description of the two Lebanese suspects, Ali Karaki and Ali Najem Aladine, as a veteran Hezbollah external operations officer and an explosives expert, respectively, should not be taken at face value, according to Valiyev. It is more likely, he said, that the two were simply spies working for Iranian intelligence.

Even the US Embassy report on the trial of the suspects suggested it also had doubts about the alleged plot. “In early October after a closed trial,” the reporting cable said, “an Azerbaijani court sentenced a group of alleged terrorists arrested the previous Spring and supposedly connected to Lebanese Hezbollah plot to bomb the Israeli Embassy in Baku AND the Qabala radar station in northern Azerbaijan” (emphasis in the original). It added, “In a public statement the state prosecutor repeated earlier claims that the entire plot was an operation of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard.”

Yet another striking anomaly about the alleged plot was the fact that nothing was published about it for an entire year. No explanation for the silence was ever made public. This silence is all the more significant because during 2009 and 2010, the Israeli government either publicly alleged or leaked stories of Iranian or Hezbollah plots in Turkey and Jordan about which the host country authorities either did not comment on or offered a different explanation. But despite the extremely close relationship between Azebaijani and Israeli intelligence services (confirmed by this US Embassy cable), neither the Israeli media nor foreign journalists were tipped off to the plot until the Israelis leaked the story to Rotella a year later.[3]

The complete absence of any leak by the Israelis for an entire year about an alleged Iranian plot to bomb the Israeli Embassy in Baku casts some circumstantial doubt on whether such a plot had indeed been uncovered in 2008, as claimed in the article.

Despite the multiple anomalies surrounding this story — the complete lack of any publicly available corroborating evidence; the well-established penchant for the Aliyev government for using such alleged plots to justify rounding up domestic critics; the US Embassy’s apparent skepticism, his failure to consult independent sources; and the 2009 publication by the Jamestown Foundation of Valiyev’s own critique of the “official” version of the case — Rotella has shown no interest in clarifying what actually happened.  In fact, as noted above, he referred to the plot again in a July 2012 article for ProPublica as if there was not the slightest doubt with regard to its actual occurrence, identifying it, as he did in the original article, as an attempted retaliation for the assassination of a senior Hezbollah operative three months before:

Conflict with Israel intensified in February 2008 after a car bomb in the heart of Damascus killed Imad Mughniyah, a notorious Hezbollah military leader and ally of Iranian intelligence. Iranian Hezbollah publicly accused Israel and vowed revenge.

Within weeks, a plot was under way against the Israeli Embassy in Azerbaijan. Police broke up the cell in May 2008. The suspects included Azeri accomplices, a senior Hezbollah field operative and a Hezbollah explosives expert. Police also arrested two Iranian spies, but they were released within weeks because of pressure from Tehran, Western anti-terror officials say.[4] The other suspects were convicted.

As narrowly sourced as it was, Rotella’s original 2009 story thus helped make a dubious tale of a bomb plot in Baku part of the media narrative. More recently, he continued that pattern by promoting the unsubstantiated charge by Argentine prosecutor Alberto Nisman and various pro-Israel groups and right-wing members of Congress, such as Florida Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, that Iran poses a growing terrorist threat to the US in the Americas. While Jim Lobe has helped deconstruct that story line, I have recently marshaled evidence showing that Nisman’s charges about alleged Iranian involvement in the 1994 AMIA bombing and the 2007 JFK airport plot were tendentious and highly questionable.

Photo: Iran’s former President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad at a dinner hosted by Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev in November 2010.

[1] In one illustration of Rotella’s and Levitt’s long-time symbiosis, Levitt cited Rotella’s account of the alleged Baku plot as his main source about the incident in a 2013 article on alleged Hezbollah terrorism published by West Point’s Combating Terrorism Center (CTC).