(MENAFN- AzerNews) 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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