Paul Goble
Staunton, Oct. 15 – Rovshan Rustamov, head of Azerbaijan Railways, says he and his Iranian opposite number, Ali Zaqeri Sardrudi, have agreed on the construction of a railway from Azerbaijan proper to the Azerbaijani exclave of Nakhichevan via Iranian territory. But experts say they are still far apart on key issues.
Given warming relations between Baku and Tehran and Armenia’s refusal to open a land corridor via Zengezur (casp-geo.ru/predstaviteli-azerbajdzhana-i-irana-obsudili-mezhparlamentskoe-sotrudnichestvo/), many observers have taken Rustamov’s declaration at face value and seen it as clearing the way for the signing of an Armenian-Azerbaijani treaty.
But Farkhad Mamedov, director of Baku’s South Caucasus Research Center and an advisor to Russia’s Valdai Club, says the two governments are still far apart on key issues that must be resolved before this alternative to the Zengezur corridor could open (vestikavkaza.ru/news/baku-i-tegeran-dogovarivautsa-o-zeleznodoroznom-zangezurskom-koridore.html).
The three most important are these: first, the two have not agreed on financing; second, they haven’t agreed who will take the lead in building it since Iran doesn’t have railways in the region in question; and third, and perhaps most serious of all, they haven’t agreed whether the route will be the international gage Iran uses or the Soviet Russian gage Azerbaijan does.
If this route were to be international gage as Iran wants, that would mean that Azerbaijan cargoes would have to transfer from the Russian gage to the Iranian one and then back to the Russian gage in the course of any passage between the two parts of Azerbaijan, something that would make this route far less attractive to Baku.
For background on what some have called the Arax route, see windowoneurasia2.blogspot.com/2023/11/could-arax-corridor-put-end-to-zengezur.html.
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