Iran’s ‘Turkmenchay threat’ reveals idle Persian hypocrisy

Any attempt to engage in the re-enactment of the conditions of a bygone age is inherently misbegotten. What is deeply-entrenched at present cannot be eradicated at a whim or indeed by a series of protracted strenuous machinations. There is no doubt that those pulling the strings in Tehran are perfectly conscious of this, yet they also seem to be of the view that no-one should begrudge them the right to be sanctimonious in relation to their secular northern neighbour – Azerbaijan – with whose independence the Ayatollah clique and its odious operatives have never truly to come to terms.

Sporadic Iranian threats to ‘reopen’ the 1828 Turkmenchay Treaty it signed with the Tsarist Russian Empire and interpret it in such a way that could enable Tehran to have territorial claims on modern independent Azerbaijan firmly belong to the realm of phantasmagoria. The assertion is legally baseless and geopolitically inconceivable, yet its nature deserves close inspection in the light of its perceived significance in the Islamic Republic’s mode of perpetuating its influence and moral authority vis-a-vis neighbouring Azerbaijan.

At the point of signing the Treaty, Iran irrevocably ceded the South Caucasus to Russia as a result of an ignominious defeat in the Second Russo-Persian War (1826-28). There was no provision in the treaty that hinted at the possibility of the resumption of Iranian control over the lost territory once the Tsarist Empire, or its successor, ceased to be in charge of this region.

Close examination demonstrates that the treaty had no particular time limitation proscribed and contains a mention of being eternally in force, which, in the eyes of modern international law, means “indefinitely”, in other words, until a new legal-political reality becomes a definitive element bearing upon the signatories. Treaties are considered terminated if the parties conclude a successive treaty relating to the same subject, and, to this effect, the 1921 Russo-Persian Treaty of Friendship cancelled all the previous agreements between the concerned sides.

In addition, in accordance with the principle of primacy in international law, since Iran recognised Azerbaijan’s regained independence and sovereignty in 1991, any reference to a precursive legal text, including the long-buried Turkmenchay Treaty, as an effective instrument, is nonsensical and undeniably beleaguered. This is perfectly understood in Iran. Nevertheless, for Tehran, the debate over the revision of the Turkmenchay Treaty is a question of a historic-civilisational claim over the sovereign territories of Azerbaijan. In Iran’s world, its northern neighbour is a lost realm whose independence can only be formalistic.

The Ayatollah clique sees, in the linchpins of Azerbaijan’s modern identity, a direct threat to its own interests and by downplaying its right to be a self-sufficient entity, Tehran thereby augments its own national integrity. There is an inextricable link between Iran’s internal Azerbaijani ethnic question and the nature of its relations with Baku. It is no surprise that the theocratic regime has consistently attributed a self-serving interpretation for nearly all the critical stages in the development of the Azerbaijani nation, awakening an artificial flair of Iranian substance.

One seemingly innocuous example is the way Tehran tried to pervert the meaning of the context that gave rise to the International Solidarity Day of Azerbaijanis. On 31 December 1989, on the USSR-Iran border, the local residents of the then-Soviet Azerbaijan dismantled fences to reunite with their co-ethnics residing on the other side. This was a moment of gargantuan symbolism, exemplifying the desire for a united Azerbaijan. Naturally, the clerics in Iran interpreted this differently, as constituting the yearning of forcibly atheistic Soviet Azerbaijan to be incorporated into the Islamic Republic, which was a complete perversion of the meaning of the occasion.

There have been two separate milestones that induced a security conundrum for Iran vis-à-vis Azerbaijan. Since the Azerbaijan Democratic Republic created in 1918 was short-lived and Tehran did not recognise its sovereign existence, it was in 1991, when Azerbaijan regained its independence, that Iran truly faced the unavoidable task of establishing full diplomatic ties with Baku. The policy of the time was to engage in supercilious ingratiation, coupled with the strategic undermining of Azerbaijan’s interests.

The geopolitical consequences of the Second Karabakh War in 2020 presented Tehran with a qualitatively new challenge. Since Azerbaijan freed itself from the burdens of the three-decade-long Armenian occupation, and became increasingly more attractive to Iran’s Turkic population, demonstrating its capability of pursuing its interests with a great deal of aplomb, Tehran began to develop a misapprehension of its very existence and discern a significant danger that should be counteracted.

Such an Iranian outlook and Azerbaijan’s indefatigable quest for a greater regional role seem to suggest, amongst other less dichotomous scenarios, one daunting probability. In historic terms, Iran and Azerbaijan, as two separate self-standing concepts, are mutually exclusive, unless the former is either substantially reconfigured, devolved or deprived of its Turkic component. And it is in this chasm that the genus of Iran’s cantankerous posturing over the Zangazur Corridor project can partly be found. The threat to reopen the Turkmenchay Treaty is idle per se and beyond the realm of realpolitik. Yet, in Iran’s self-deluded perception, it has the power of equipping it with the grounds for portentous moralising over how that very dichotomy should be resolved.