Epress.am News from Armenia
A profile analysis of Azerbaijan’s President Ilham Aliyev shows that the US Embassy in Baku considers him to be “Michael (Corleone) on the outside,” but “Sonny on the inside.” This was revealed just recently in yet another released US Embassy cable (09BAKU749) dated Sept. 18, 2009. The cable goes on to note Aliyev’s different approaches to foreign and domestic policies.
“He typically devises the former [foreign policy] with pragmatism, restraint and a helpful bias toward integration with the West, yet at home his policies have become increasingly authoritarian and hostile to diversity of political views. This divergence of approaches, combined with his father’s continuing omnipresence, has led some observers to compare the Aliyevs with the fictional ‘Corleones’ of Godfather fame, with the current president described alternately as a mix of ‘Michael’ and ‘Sonny.’ Either way, this Michael/Sonny dichotomy complicates our approach to Baku and has the unfortunate effect of framing what should be a strategically valuable relationship as a choice between US interests and US values,” reads the cable.
What is of interest to Armenia perhaps in this cable is this particular US charge’s view that though Aliyev publicly makes bellicose statements with respect to Azerbaijan’s “legal right” to Nagorno-Karabakh, he is also working on the Basic Principles proposed by the OSCE Minsk Group and apparently has a good rapport with Armenia’s President Serzh Sargsyan:
“In foreign policy, Aliyev has also been able to maintain generally the distinction between “business and personal.” For all his bluster about Azerbaijan’s legal right to liberate the Armenian-occupied territories by force, Aliyev has worked constructively on the Minsk Group–proposed Basic Principles and developed a reportedly good rapport with Armenian President Sargsian — in contrast to the much more confrontational relationship between the countries’ foreign ministers.
On the matter of Armenia-Turkey rapprochement (by way of the Protocols signed in Oct. 2009, the ratification of which has since stalled), the US Embassy in Baku believes that though Aliyev is against such rapprochement without a resolution to the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict, he is not going to consider stopping the export of Azerbaijani oil to Turkey:
“Similarly, even as Aliyev regards with horror the prospect of Turkey-Armenia rapprochement ahead of Nagorno-Karabakh resolution, the President has instructed SOCAR to continue gas transit and supply talks with Turkey, and no one in Baku has dared to consider a cut in oil exports through the BTC pipeline. The gas transit talks are a hardball affair to be sure, but Aliyev surely recognizes that Azerbaijan cannot really afford a total rupture with Turkey and certainly is not going to go so far as to foreclose on options out of pique while the Turkey-Armenia question remains open.”