According to the Armenian National Committee of America (ANCA), Congressman Schiff is demanding an explanation from the Department regarding plans to sell high-powered US-made small arms to Azerbaijan, including semiautomatic sniper rifles. Schiff has called on his colleagues to join him; he has also sent a letter to Secretary of Commerce Gina Raimondo requesting “additional information from the Commerce Department about the status of any requests for export licenses to send lethal weapons to Azerbaijan.”
Note that Schiff’s appeal is not the only one of its kind. After news spread in early February this year that Azerbaijan intended to purchase various types of automatic weapons and machine guns from the United States, another pro-Armenian member of Congress, Senator Robert Menendez, too, sent a letter to Raimondo, voicing his concern and demanding an explanation.
Raimondo was also approached by ANCA and the Rhode Island Armenian community organization (Raimondo herself, incidentally, formerly served as governor of that state). They urged the Secretary of Commerce not to accept requests for arms exports to Azerbaijan.
You will recall that in the early 1990s the United States banned sending any weapons and military equipment to Azerbaijan, applying the notorious Amendment 907, and vetoed any financial assistance to Azerbaijan, except for humanitarian aid.
After the al-Qaeda terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, Washington suspended the amendment in view of Azerbaijan’s accession to the global coalition against terrorism. As a result, the US began to provide military assistance to Baku, albeit on a limited scale. In particular, the US sent equipment and patrol boats to enhance the protection of the borders of Azerbaijan. Nevertheless, the US ban on arms sales to Baku is still in force: Washington explained that it refused to arm either party in the Armenian-Azerbaijani conflict.
Meanwhile, the Azerbaijani authorities have repeatedly made requests to buy advanced weapons from the US. In particular, from the infamous WikiLeaks documents it became known that Baku asked Washington for air defense systems and high-precision missiles. However, these requests remained without response.
In the fall of 2020, Azerbaijan was able to liberate its territories from occupation without American weapons. This proved the country’s fighting power and rendered the embargo imposed by Washington irrelevant. Seeing that the Karabakh conflict is in the past, the US administration has now expressed its own interest in developing military cooperation with Azerbaijan.
To this end, a number of reciprocal visits of high-ranking military officials of the two countries have taken place recently. For example, a delegation headed by First Deputy Defense Minister of Azerbaijan, Chief of General Staff Colonel General Kerim Veliyev visited the United States in November last year, and just a few days ago Deputy Defense Minister of Azerbaijan, Air Force Commander General Ramiz Tahirov discussed regional security and the current state of military cooperation between the countries with his American counterparts.
The information that the US is ready to sell automatic weapons to Azerbaijan has spread amid high-level military contacts between the two countries, although the details are not yet known. It would seem that there are no substantial grounds for such a deal, because at present Azerbaijan has no problems with arming its military; moreover, the country has established successful military-technical cooperation with Turkey, Israel, as well as some European countries.
Nevertheless, military cooperation with the United States is of political and even geopolitical importance. Since the Karabakh conflict is over, the US is close to removing obstacles to arms sales to Azerbaijan. This is facilitated by the Iranian factor, as well as America’s desire to displace the traditional arms supplier of the region, Russia.
It is not surprising that the Armenian lobby in the US Congress has been trying and will continue to try by all means to block the sale of arms to Azerbaijan. By the way, the Armenian efforts do not go unnoticed: the delay in the sale of the upgraded F-16 fighters to Turkey is largely an “achievement” of the Armenian lobby.
Farid Isayev
Translated fromHaqqin.az
