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has been a momentous week for the future of the
Caucasus. The long anticipated transfer of power
in Azerbaijan began to take effect with the ailing
grey fox Heidar Aliev apparently on his deathbed,
first in Turkey and now in the United States, and
his son Ilham confirmed as Prime Minister and heir-in-waiting.
The former Soviet Union's first dynastic succession
makes democracy a matter of genetic inheritance
in Armenia's neighbor, a generation game that the
presidential elections in October are expected only
to affirm rather than to alter.
In Georgia, the jostling for
power will soon begin to succeed the equally venerable
Eduard Shevardnadze as President. Unlike in Azerbaijan,
where the Aliev shuffle has been much rehearsed,
nobody is predicting who will emerge as victor
in Tbilisi or how. This is not so unusual - few
people had heard of Vladimir Putin in early 1999
but by the end of that year he was acting President
of Russia. However, the likelihood is that whoever
wins in Georgia will be much closer in age to
Robert Kocharyan and Ilham Aliev than to Eduard
and Heidar.
Shevardnadze and Aliev are steeped
in the history and governing techniques of Soviet
times, they understand how to run things from
the center and how to play the game of political
survival. Uniquely in the region, independent
Armenia has never turned to its former Communist
boss when times got tough, though it came very
close (some still insist it was more than close
enough) during the 1998 presidential contest between
Kocharyan and the late Karen Demirchyan. Kocharyan
has always stood out in the region for the reason
that he rose to power through a non-traditional
and unexpected process.
Soon, however, he will be the
senior political figure in the Caucasus. He will
be the most experienced of a fresh generation
of political leaders whose formative experiences
owe nothing to the Soviet past but are instead
the products of ethnic strife, economic collapse,
and national uncertainty. They will share a common
background and the question will be whether it
produces a common language that meets the challenges
of the time.
How will Kocharyan react to
his elevated new status? Will it make him bolder
in the search for peace and stability in the region?
Or more guarded in the face of an unpredictable
and possibly unstable regime?
How will Aliev junior seek to
consolidate his grip on power? By playing a crude
nationalist card over Nagorno Karabakh? Or by
advancing a national interest which sees a guarantee
of peace as an essential prerequisite of real
improvement for all the countries and peoples
of the Caucasus?
It must be hoped that strategists
on the Armenian side have been game-playing the
probable scenarios that arise from the transfer
of power in Azerbaijan. That they see where the
opportunities and obstacles may arise. The region
is entering a new landscape, which will reveal
ultimately whether Kocharyan has what it takes
to become a statesman or whether his ambitions
and abilities are much more narrowly defined.
That seems a strange sentence given the cloud
of suspicion that hovers over Kocharyan following
the corrupted election process that delivered
him a second term of office in March. Opposition
parties preparing a fresh attempt to oust him
from office, while Kocharyan's international reputation
and that of Armenia have rarely if ever been lower.
But the region is entering strange times and odd
things can happen. Just look at
Azerbaijan.
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