Author: Babajanian Karo

NATO CHIEF TOURS CAUCASUS WITH KIND WORDS FOR GEORGIA, CRITICISM FOR AZERBAIJAN
by Joshua Kucera

EurasiaNet.org
Sept 7 2012
NY

NATO Secretary General Anders Fogh Rasmussen and the President of
Azerbaijan Ilham Aliyev on their way to the joint press conference

NATO’s Secretary General Anders Fogh Rasmussen took a quick trip
through all three south Caucasus countries this week, where he
criticized Azerbaijan’s pardon of a soldier who killed an Armenian
while on a joint NATO exercise in Hungary. Rasmussen also voiced
strong support for Georgia’s (eventual) alliance membership.

Rasmussen’s trip took place at a time of heightened tensions in the
Caucasus, especially between Armenia and Azerbaijan, over the pardon
of Lieutenant — now Major — Ramil Safarov. At a speech in Baku, he
pretty strongly condemned the move:

I am deeply concerned by the Azerbaijani decision to pardon Ramil
Safarov. The act he committed in 2004 was a crime which should not be
glorified, as this damages trust and does not contribute to the peace
process.

At a joint press conference with President Ilham Aliyev, Rasmussen was
asked about the issue, and Aliyev answered too, defending the pardon
as in line with the Constitution, which must have been a bit of an
awkward moment.

Rasmussen used identical words at a speech in Yerevan, and they
apparently weren’t strong enough for a number of protesters at his
speech.

The reception was warmer in Tbilisi, of course, where President
Mikheil Saakashvili said that Rasmussen deserved to be named an
“honorary Georgian.” Rasmussen gave a fairly strong endorsement of the
concept, at least, of Georgian membership in NATO:

Georgia is a special partner for NATO, and model of commitment…. Of
course Georgia wants to be more than an active NATO partner, you want
to become a NATO member and our summit in Bucharest in 2008, and we
decided that Georgia will become a member of NATO. In Chicago, in May
this year, we make clear that we stand by that decision and we
welcomed Georgia~Rs progress. NATO~Rs door is open to countries which
show real and sustained efforts towards reform and integration. You
have set out on a bold reform course and you have made tremendous
progress. That hard work has brought you closer to NATO membership.

Rasmussen was asked about statements by former Russian president
Dmitry Medvedev that the 2008 war had stopped NATO expansion, and
Rasmussen said that wasn’t the case:

If the intension of the 2008 conflict was to interfere with NATO
decisions on our open door policy, NATO decisions of enlargement, I
can assure you that it has failed, because no third country has any
right to interfere with NATO decisions, it~Rs for NATO to decide on our
open door policy and we have stated over and over again and
reinterpreted in Chicago that our door remains open. We stick to the
principle that it is for its individual nation to decide its alliance
affiliation itself. And we hope Russia will respect this principle as
well.

However, Rasmussen also emphasized that the conduct of upcoming
elections in Georgia would be closely watched by NATO and other
Western partners, and would be treated as a litmus test for future
cooperation. The notion of a litmus test has become the consensus
Western position, but some visiting U.S. senators said that Georgia
was already ready for a big new step in defense cooperation. Also
visiting this week, Senators John McCain, Joe Lieberman and Lindsey
Graham gave their strong support for giving weapons to Georgia,
without mention of a litmus test of successful elections:

~SWe have fought for in the Congress and will continue to fight for
defensive weapons from the United States to Georgia so the government
can defend the people of Georgia and their freedom,~T Senator Joe
Lieberman told journalists in Tbilisi.

~SGeorgia needs defensive weapons and we will continue doing everything
we can to make sure that those defensive weapons are provided to
Georgia, because every nation should have the ability to have
defensive weapons in order to defend themselves,~T Senator John McCain
said.

NATO IS NOT PLEASED WITH HERO’S HOMECOMING FOR CONVICTED AX MURDERER

International Business Times

Sept 7 2012

By Angelo Young: Subscribe to Angelo’s RSS feed

NATO is not happy with Azerbaijan’s president for pardoning,
promoting and financially rewarding Ramil Safarov, who was serving
a life sentence in Hungary for hacking a fellow NATO solider,
who was Armenian, to death with an ax eight years ago during a
language-training program.

Budapest authorized Safarov’s extradition to his homeland, where last
week he was given a hero’s homecoming. Armenia severed diplomatic ties
with Hungary over its decision to release Safarov for the killing of
26-year-old Gurgen Markarian.

“I am deeply concerned by the Azerbaijani decision to pardon Ramil
Safarov. The act he committed in 2004 was a crime which should not
be glorified, as this damages trust and does not contribute to the
peace process,” NATO Secretary General Anders Fogh Rasmussen said in
a speech Friday at the Azerbaijan Diplomatic Academy, in Baku. “There
must be no return to conflict between Armenia and Azerbaijan.”

The killing, extradition and pardon have deep political undertones. In
1994, a ceasefire was declared between Azerbaijan and Armenia,
which had been fighting over Nagorno-Karabakh, a landlocked region in
Azerbaijan populated by ethnic Armenians that had been autonomous from
the state under the USSR. Azeri President Ilham Aliyev has repeatedly
vowed to take the region militarily.

Last week, the White House issued a statement condemning Aliyev’s
pardon. It added: “The United States is also requesting an explanation
from Hungary regarding its decision to transfer Safarov to Azerbaijan.”

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The head of Azerbaijan’s foreign relations, Novruz Mammadov, issued a
statement accusing Armenia’s leadership of “open support for terror”
that emboldens groups like the Armenian Secret Army for the Liberation
of Armenia (ASALA), which is seeking to re-establish the historical
boundaries of Armenia, which include a large part of eastern Turkey
as well as Nagorno-Karabakh and the land between the disputed region
and the Armenian border.

Aliyev’s decision to treat Safarov as a war hero has enraged the
Armenian public, which staged protests this week in the capital,
Yerevan, where Rasmussen visited on Tuesday.

NATO is urging both countries to resolve their conflict “through
dialogue, compromise and cooperation,” Rasmussen said.

The United Nations backed these statements on Thursday, but Azeri
public sentiment appears to be on the side of its president and the
convicted killer he pardoned.

“The extradition and pardoning of national army officer Ramil Safarov
has filled us, young people, and indeed the entire nation with a sense
of pride and joy,” said one letter posted on the president’s website
that purported to be from a local youth club manager, according to
the AFP.

Approximately 30,000 people were killed in the 1988-1994 war between
the two countries. The countries fought a previous war over the issue
from 1918 until the Sovet Union swallowed up both countries in 1922.

VIOLENCE FLARES ON THE GEORGIAN-RUSSIAN BORDER

September 7, 2012

Thomas de Waal [2]

[GeorgiaRussia.jpg] Frontier post on the Russian-Georgian border.The
Caucasus has been burning this week.

Armenia and Azerbaijan are nearer to renewed conflict. In 2004, Ramil
Safarov, an Azerbaijani Army lieutenant, murdered an Armenian officer
during a NATO-sponsored course in Hungary. This week, returning to Baku
a convicted killer, Safarov was nonetheless pardoned and afforded a
hero’s welcome, provoking an inevitable storm of fury in Armenia and
an outpouring of international concern.

Meanwhile, there has been the worst upsurge of violence on the
Georgian-Russian border since 2008, this time between Georgian
security forces and a band of North Caucasian fighters. The fighting
took place on Georgia’s eastern border with the Russian republic of
Dagestan. Three Georgian servicemen and eleven of the fighters were
reported killed on August 28-29 in an operation that the government
in Tbilisi said was carried out to secure the freedom of a group of
villagers taken hostage.

The news dominated the Georgian media for three days, eclipsing
coverage of the October 1 parliamentary election.

At the same time, Dagestan itself was facing an even bigger crisis,
following the assassination of Said Efendi Chirkeisky, one of its
most respected Sufi clerics, by a female suicide bomber. Up to one
hundred thousand people (in a population of two million in Dagestan)
were reported to have turned out to attend the funeral of Said Efendi,
who was trying to mediate between different Islamic factions in
his republic.

The Georgian episode is dangerous for another reason, because of its
obvious potential to be politicized and turned into a new pretext
for Georgian-Russian confrontation.

So far that has been avoided. The main reaction in Moscow was a lack
of reaction, basically a silent admission that the Georgian forces
probably had indeed fought off a band of North Caucasian insurgents.

That was something for which they should feel grateful, but the words
“Thank you, Georgia,” could never pass their lips.

In Georgia, much of the media has been abuzz with conspiracy
theories. Some commentators have speculated that this was a deliberate
attempt by the Russian authorities to provoke a crisis in Georgia. That
seems highly fanciful. The problem the Russian authorities have in
Dagestan is that they have too little control of the region, not too
much. It is unlikely that they would have been able to manipulate
the movement of a group of militants high in the mountains.

It has since come to light that several of the fighters who died
spoke Georgian and came from the Pankisi Gorge region, which has
close historical links to Chechnya. So it is also possible that the
Islamist group was trying to get into Dagestan, not out of there.

Most likely, this was a very local episode with local causes, a group
of fighters crossing a mountainous border for reasons very specific
to themselves. Dagestan is one of the world’s most complex multiethnic
regions, home to at least fourteen main national groups.

Over the last decade and a half, it has turned into a smaller version
of Lebanon in the 1980s, the location of several overlapping conflicts:
jihadi, interethnic, sectarian, and over power and money.

The Russian website Caucasian Knot, which closely monitors the North
Caucasus, reported that 185 people had been killed and 168 wounded
in political and religious violence in the first half of this year.

Objectively speaking, Russia and Georgia, the latter of which borders
six out of the seven North Caucasian republics, have a strong interest
in working together to contain trouble in this turbulent region.

In former times, they were collaborators. Historically, Christian
Georgians were willing partners in the Russian imperial project to
subdue the Muslim tribes of the North Caucasus. One of the most
infamous episodes of the Caucasian wars came in 1854, when the
Dagestani Islamic leader Imam Shamil sent a small army to gallop into
the Georgian province of Kakheti (where this week’s incident took
place) and abducted the family of the prince and imperial military
commander David Chavchavadze.

More recently, of course, Russians and Georgians have signally failed
to work together. Russia has accused the Georgians of at best failing
to deal with the North Caucasian insurgency or at worst of aiding
it-this was the source of two years of mutual recriminations about
who was residing in the Pankisi Gorge region in 2000-2001. In 2004,
anti-Georgian sentiment apparently trumped common sense, when the
Russians vetoed the continuation of the OSCE monitoring mission that
had been keeping watch over Georgia’s border with Chechnya.

Georgian policy toward the North Caucasus could be described
as schizophrenic. On the one hand, there is a recognition that the
region to the north is a source of instability and needs to be handled
responsibly. On the other hand, there is a temptation to use it to
poke the Russians in the eye and remind them how vulnerable they are
(surely never a good tactic with Russia).

So the government in Tbilisi unveiled a perfectly sensible policy to
grant visa-free travel for North Caucasians to Georgia, thus giving
them an outlet from their claustrophobic region. But the Georgians
spoiled it by springing the policy as a surprise-provoking predictable
anger in Moscow. And last year, the Georgian parliament recognized
the mass deportations of Circassians from the Russian empire in the
mid-nineteenth century. Despite the genuine historical claims of the
Circassians, it was a highly politicized and not very clever jab at
Russia over a very sensitive issue.

The North Caucasus remains trapped within its seemingly endless cycle
of violence and repression. It would be nice to think that the tragic
events in Georgia last week could be a pretext for Tbilisi and Moscow
to consider working together on its problems-especially as it remains
likely that bloody episodes like the one this week in eastern Georgia
will recur. But that is almost certainly too much to hope for.

Thomas de Waal is a senior associate at the Carnegie Endowment for
International Peace.

Image: Magomed Aliev/RIA Novosti archive [3]

MONSTER’S PUNISHMENT ONLY MATTER OF TIME – ARMENIAN MP ABOUT AZERI MURDERER

news.am
September 06, 2012 | 13:28

YEREVAN. – If Armenia uses the diplomatic, political arsenal, ir can
gain political dividends from the release of Azerbaijani murderer,
opposition ARF Dashnaktsutyun former MP Lilit Galstyan told the
journalists on Thursday.

The other participant of the conference ruling Republican Party of
Armenia MP Artak Davtyan said that the Parliament may adopt lots of
documents but it passed the right one by responding to the provocation.

“We would better be avoiding of emotional assessments and
qualifications as much as possible,” Davtyan emphasized adding it is
only matter of time to punish properly the monster in freedom.

ARMENIA MUST STOP NEGOTIATIONS OVER NAGORNO-KARABAKH – POLITICAL FIGURE

tert.am
07.09.12

Ashot Manucharyan, former security advisor to Armenia’s first president
Levon Ter-Petrosyan, believes Armenia’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs
is committing a gross blunder by not pulling out of the talks on
settlement of the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict.

“Who are we negotiating with? Is it the one stating that his aim is
to kill Armenians and one killing an Armenian is a national hero?

Statements [by the international community] that they are concerned,
they are against… However, Azerbaijan’s machine goes on operating,
responding to all the statements, saying they have acted right,”
Manucharyan told Tert.am.

Not to be accused of pursuing a destructive policy, Armenia should
raise specific issues at the international level and demand that the
international community respond.

Azerbaijan does not accept the international community’s stance on
its granting a pardon to a murderer of a sleeping man and violates
all the security resolutions, what does the world think of that and
what can it offer Armenia?

Azerbaijan has violated the Treaty on Conventional Armed Forces in
Europe (CFE) by inflating its military budget, while the international
community goes on selling weapons to Azerbaijan.

“Azerbaijan has violated international law. We have not accepted that,
while the international community demands that Azerbaijan respect the
law,” Manucharyan said. The world also demands withdrawal of snipers
from the Armenian-Azerbaijani border, which has not been done.

“So we cannot continue the negotiations. Let them find another
format for establishing peace,” Manucharyan said, noting that it is
not the OSCE Minsk Group, but “the very negotiation process” that
needs reforming.

The problem is as follows: the Nagorno-Karabakh foreign office
has issued a statement that Azerbaijan is creating conditions for
annihilating the Nagorno-Karabakh population. “Armenia, in turn, says
it continues negotiations enabling them to develop their murderous
activities. This is absurd!”

Armenia must inform the UN Security Council, OSCE Minsk Group and
other agencies of the current situation and asked them for solutions,
Manucharyan said.

WASHINGTON IS IN TOUCH WITH AUTHORITIES ARMENIA AND AZERBAIJAN REGARDING EXTRADITION AND PARDONING AZERBAIJANI KILLER SAFAROV

arminfo
Friday, September 7, 19:34

The U.S. Department of State has maintained contacts with the
authorities of Azerbaijan in connection with pardoning and promoting
the Azerbaijani officer Ramil Safarov from Hungary, Patrick Ventrell,
Acting Deputy Spokesperson, said at Daily Press Briefing in Washington.

“Well, we most definitely have been in touch with authorities. I’d have
to check in after the briefing to see at what level. But our statements
expressed our deep concern in this regard, and so we’ve definitely been
in touch through bilateral communication through those channels. But
let me see if we can get you a little bit more information,” he said.

Vintrell said that they are going to continue to maintain contacts
with both Armenia and Azerbaijan to peacefully resolve the conflict
and reduce tensions. “And we really condemn any action that fuels
regional tensions, and that’s why we were so deeply disappointed by
Hungary’s decision to transfer him to Azerbaijan.

We’re definitely in touch with Armenia, obviously through our Embassy,
but also through other channels,” he said.

To recall, on August 31 the Armenian authorities adopted a decision to
suspend diplomatic relations and official contacts with Hungary after
the Hungarian authorities extradited Azeri officer Ramil Safarov,
who was sentenced by a Hungarian court to life in jail for killing
sleeping Armenian officer Gurgen Margaryan with an axe in Budapest
in 2004. Both the officers were undergoing an English language course
under the NATO PfP program. The same day after Safarov’s extradition,
Azeri President Ilham Aliyev decreed to pardon and reward the criminal.

US SENATOR CALLS ON PRESIDENT ALIEV TO APOLOGIZE TO FAMILY OF AZERBAIJANI MURDERER’S ARMENIAN VICTIM

news.am
September 07, 2012 | 20:50

WASHINGTON – U.S. Senator Robert Menendez, a member of the Senate
Foreign Relations Committee, on Friday released a statement decrying
the release of convicted axe murderer Ramil Safarov and condemning
Azeri President Aliyev’s decision to pardon, promote, and glorify
Safarov for his heinous murder of Armenian Gurgen Markarian, reads
the statement, Armenian News-NEWS.am reports.

On August 31, Hungary extradited Safarov – who brutally murdered his
colleague, Armenian officer Gurgen Markarian, in his sleep – to Baku
to serve no less than 25 years of the life sentence imposed by the
Hungarian justice system.

“I am aghast at the decision of President Aliyev to pardon Ramil
Safarov for his heinous crime. I am outraged and disgusted by the
reception that Safarov was given upon returning to Azerbaijan –
a hero’s welcome, a free apartment and a promotion. This blatant
disregard for justice is unacceptable and I condemn Aliyev’s actions
in the strongest way possible. I am also troubled by Hungary’s decision
to extradite Safarov and believe that, given the breach of extradition
agreement, Hungary must now demand the return of Safarov to complete
his life-sentence,” Menendez commented.

“At this moment, with relations in the Caucasus region as tense as
ever, the highly deplorable actions of President Aliyev undermine
the credibility of his government and his commitment to work toward a
peaceful resolution of differences with Armenia. I call on President
Aliyev to apologize to the family of Gurgen Markarian and for the
international community to demand Safarov’s return to Hungary to
complete the remainder of his life sentence. It is clear that the
Azeri government cannot be counted on to adhere to its international
or bilateral obligations with respect to this matter.”

ARMENIA EXPO 2012 GETS UNDERWAY IN YEREVAN
Nvard Davtyan

“Radiolur”
07.09.2012 18:04

Armenia EXPO 2012 universal annual regional commercial and industrial
exhibition-forum opened at the Karen Demirchyan Sport and Concert
Complex. The event has been organized by the Union of Manufacturers
and Businessmen (Employers) of Armenia and the Logos Expo Company.

Armenia EXPO has brought together a number of local and foreign
companies, providing them with an opportunity to present their
production and find new partners.

More than 100 companies from Armenia, Artsakh, Russia, Ukraine,
Belarus and Iran will present their production up until September 9,
2012. Minister of Economy Tigran Davtyan describes the Armenia EXPO
as one of the most important export-oriented exhibitions.

ARMENIAN DM, US CONGRESSMAN DISCUSS BILATERAL DEFENSE COOPERATION

armradio.am
07.09.2012 11:23

Armenian Defense Minister Seyran Ohanyan received Dan Burton,
Chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee’s Subcommittee on
Europe and Eurasia.

Greeting the guest, the Armenian Defense Minister hailed
the contribution of the US Congress to the development of the
Armenian-American defense cooperation, particularly in the fields of
military education and reforms. He underlined the importance of US
balanced approach to the countries of the region.

Highly appreciating the current high level of bilateral relations,
the US Congressman promised to convey the position of the Armenian
Defense Minister to the US Congress.

During the meeting the parties dwelt on other issues of bilateral
interest related to regional security and defense cooperation.

ARMENIA TO HOST WIKICONFERENCE

tert.am
07.09.12

A Wikiconference is to take place at the Marriott hotel in Yerevan,
Armenia, Sept. 8 and 9, Wikimedia Foundation reports.

The organizers call on people interested in knowledge, culture and
technologies, sharing their experience and creating a world where
knowledge will be available to everyone to take part in the conference.