Rediscovering Central Asia, Azerbaijan mending once-broken ties to bolster inter-Turkic alliance
By Fuad Muxtar-Aqbabali
Azerbaijan’s multi-vector foreign policy course is bearing fruit with each visit of President Ilham Aliyev to strategically located energy-rich Central Asian nations.
As official Baku is stepping up efforts to make leeway in the Central Asian region, the Kyrgyzstan visit of the Azerbaijani president this week will go down in history as very productive, designed to rapidly develop and reinforce the Central Asian dimension of Baku’s foreign policy course.
The state visit, on the one hand, will be incontrovertibly conducive to rapprochement between the two nations, on the other hand, it will enrich the Turkic nations' collective efforts to eliminate differences among them that came into view when the former empire collapsed.
Azerbaijan and Kyrgyzstan signed the Declaration on Strategic Partnership six months ago when President Sadyr Japarov visited Baku, and this document has already raised the relations to a qualitatively new level. In Bishkek, both leaders underscored the successful implementation of the declaration, vowing to crown the interstate contacts with further deepening of all-out ties. Much of what the parties identified six months ago is already being transformed into real politics today.
Addressing the media, the Azerbaijani president added that he and his Kyrgyz counterpart discussed in detail a wide range of issues on interaction in cultural, economic, transport, education, and high technologies sectors.
The Azerbaijani president, in particular, underscored that two Azerbaijani satellites - Azersky and Azerspace-1 - have been providing services to Kyrgyz partners for some time now, and further ways to develop cooperation in this sector were identified during the visit.
The Azerbaijani president went further, underlining that the construction and operation of the new China-Kyrgyzstan-Uzbekistan-Caspian railway will increase trade and reduce transportation costs.
A two-day visit of President Ilham Aliyev to Bishkek started on October 11. On October 13, the Azerbaijani leader arrived in another Central Asian nation of Kazakhstan to attend the summit of the Conference on Interaction and Confidence Building Measures in Asia (CICA) and held one-on-one meetings with other leaders. On October 14, President Ilham Aliyev attended the Council of CIS Heads of State meeting in Astana. Bearing in mind that most of the leaders are from states close to the region, the president’s meetings will inevitably be productive for deepening the comprehensive ties with regional nations and cementing Azerbaijan's clout both at the regional and global levels.
The meetings, discussions, clarification of positions on various issues, strengthening of mutual understanding, and establishment of new contacts to push mutually beneficial agendas are some of the time-tested major foreign policy objectives of the nation. This traditional balancing policy of Azerbaijan is advantageous as it benefits all actors and their national interests. The president’s foreign policy team is driven by the national interests of the country and thus its parameters remain stable, balanced, predictable, and independent of the conjunctures. Azerbaijan's foreign policy targets are a combination of political and economic interests and they manifest themselves in the president's statements, visits, and daily deeds.
The intensification in Azerbaijan’s Central Asian policy dimension is due to the geopolitical changes unfolding in the wider region and hopes are high in the various expert communities that the overall picture will undergo unrecognizable changes in years to come. The multiplication of the Central Asian dimension is also the upshot of the geopolitical upheavals on the continent, the ongoing Russian war in Ukraine, the deepening energy crisis with no light at the end of the tunnel, and the breakdown of traditional logistic routes, to name a few. With the restructuring of the logistic network in the new context, relations along the Azerbaijani-Central Asia line are also being built and the presence of an energy and transit component in them is increasing.
Azerbaijan has traditionally enjoyed the longest and strongest ties with Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan among the Central Asian nations. But lately, they have been quickly overtaken by contacts between Baku and Bishkek, and the Kyrgyz president’s meeting the Azerbaijani president at the Bishkek airport personally is a barometer of official Bishkek’s interest in burgeoning cooperation with Baku.
There are more than enough topics for discussion between the countries, and the Kyrgyz president’s April visit to Baku tested the waters and surfaced Azerbaijan’s keen interest in rebuilding the old ties that once existed due to being part of the empire that ceased to continue with the demise of the USSR. In April, official Baku and Bishkek signed some documents, including the Declaration on Strategic Partnership, as well as a memorandum on the establishment of an interstate council, and this visit of the Azerbaijani leader is to bring the ties to the level desired by the parties as well as their national interests.
The formation of the contractual base continued in Bishkek on 11 October with the signing of several important documents. First, an intergovernmental agreement on the establishment of the Azerbaijani-Kyrgyz Development Fund was signed. The fund with $25m was established to promote economic cooperation between Azerbaijan and Kyrgyzstan, upgrade and develop the economic ties and effectively use opportunities that are available.
Azerbaijan and Uzbekistan are planning to set up a similar investment fund with a registered capital of $500 m to invest in joint projects. Azerbaijan’s Central Asian dimension has become particularly relevant in light of the development of economic relations and political contacts between Baku and the regional nations amid ongoing alterations in the wider region that requires synchronizing the watches to seek and ensure mutual support whenever needed.
To this effect, the leading role is played by Azerbaijan and some leading Central Asian leaders that are gradually realizing this pressing need as huge changes promise to soon reconfigure the entire region along with titanic global changes in the pipeline. The members of the Turkic alliance are set to speed up collaboration to occupy the rightful and deserved place in tomorrow’s world that promises to be completely different from today.
Spearheaded by the alliance of the Turkic nations, they all together should shoulder the burden and play a lead role in taking forward themselves together and separately to bring closer the long-sought crucial target the alliance is aspiring to succeed. The Central Asian nations of Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, Turkmenistan, and now Kyrgyzstan are Baku’s active partners in political dialogue within the framework of Turkic cooperation, and Turkey has to play a crucial role to this effect and Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s efforts are indications of the realization of these objectives.
Azerbaijan is an important link that connects the western pole of the Turkic alliance - Azerbaijan and Turkey - with the eastern one, where our country's main partners in Central Asia play an important role. As a middle link between these poles, Azerbaijan must actively interact with all states and this interaction serves the interests of all external stakeholders, who understand that the fates of several important projects depend on this cooperation to make the region attractive economically for investors.
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