"We are against Caspian militarisation by extra-regional forces, and we said so on many occasions," Abdollah Ramazanzadeh, official Iranian government spokesman, said in a Novosti interview.
"As we see it, stepping up bi- and multilateral contacts with the Caspian countries may cancel the prospects of military presence in the region."
Our interviewee said he was satisfied with present-day Iranian contacts with the other four littoral countries-Russia, Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan and Turkmenistan. True, there are differences on certain issues, especially the new Caspian legal status, but contacts are making steady progress, despite all.
Iranian political analysts expect the USA to step up military-technological partnership with Azerbaijan, and use the latter's economic problems to establish American and NATO military bases quite close to the Azeri-Iranian frontier and in the sea. Teheran views the prospects as a direct threat to Iran, and a pretext for extra-regional forces to intervene in Caspian issue settlement.
