The Atlantic
Sept 9 2012
So I Pardoned an Axe Murder: The Geopolitics of Setting a Killer Free
Armin Rosen – Atlantic Media fellow.
The most vicious slow-boil conflict you’ve never heard of yields the
most bizarre axe-related diplomatic incident in years.
In 2004, a military officer from the majority Shiite nation of
Azerbaijan named Ramil Safarov hacked an Armenian counterpart to death
with an axe while both were attending a NATO language-training course
in Hungary. Murdering a guest of NATO and an officer from a foreign
government will probably not go down as a great moment in diplomatic
probity. And yet, Hungary last week extradited Safarov back to
Azerbaijan, where the president pardoned him for his act of senseless
and apparently unwarranted violence. The bizarre and bloody incident
is a reminder of the tense relationship, which can itself be both
bizarre and bloody at times, between these two former Soviet
republics.
There are a few things to understand about this complicated corner of
the world that might help inform the axe attack and its aftermath.
First, Armenia and Azerbaijan have been in some state of conflict
since declaring independence from the Soviet Union. The war that broke
out in 1988 officially ended six years later. But, with some of the
most contested issues left unresolved, occasional cross-border
violence has continued, including several times in just 2011. Second,
perhaps the most important of those unresolved issues is the status of
the Ngarno-Karbakh region of Azerbaijan, an Armenian-occupied
“independent republic” that has been almost completely cleansed of its
Azeri population. Safarov’s family just happens to be from
Ngaron-Karbakh. And, third, Armenian-Azeri tension over the disputed
region seems to be getting worse.
On August 31, Hungary extradited Safarov, who was serving a life
sentence for the Armenian officer’s murder, to Azerbaijan, where Azeri
president Ilham Aliyev immediately pardoned him. It’s impossible to
know for sure why Hungary would do this, although it’s worth noting
that Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban has taken plenty of Western
criticism for his government’s apparently backsliding democracy.
Orban’s political party has pushed a series of allegedly
anti-democratic measures through Hungary’s parliament and rules with
an increasingly autocratic and nationalistic style. As Budapest-based
Professor Peter Marton explained in a post at Registan.net, Orban has
started looking away from Europe and toward autocratic states for
economic opportunity and political support. One of his new friends
just happens to be Azerbaijan.
[Orban’s government] also announced a policy of “global opening” and
later a policy of “eastern opening,” turning, for favorable economic
cooperation agreements and assistance, to countries like China, Saudi
Arabia, and even Azerbaijan. In the beginning of August this year,
news emerged that Hungary was considering an issuance of sovereign
bonds in Turkey, denominated in either Turkish lira or Azeri manat, or
both. At around the same time, the Azeri oil firm, SOCAR indicated
they would eventually decide on whether they would prefer the
Nabucco-West or the TAP (Trans-Adriatic) pipeline as the priority arm
of the gas supply route carrying gas from the Caspian Shah Deniz field
to Europe.
As Marton explains, Azerbaijan has spent the last eight years
pressuring the Hungarian government to release Safarov back home, and
it seems Orban has finally capitulated. That could risk further
isolating Hungary within Europe, even if it raises the potential for
Hungarian-Azeri cooperation. Armenia has already cut off diplomatic
relations with Hungary over the incident, and the decision has sparked
protests within Hungary itself, though the Hungarian government claims
that Azerbaijan promised not to pardon Safarov.
The Ngarno-Karbakh conflict doesn’t get a lot of press in the United
States (you can find one of the few English-language books on the
subject here). But it is still a potential powder keg, already the
cause of a small-scale regional arms race and a significant impediment
to normalizing relations between Armenia and its other big neighbor,
Turkey. With the peace process stalled, George Mason University
professor Phil Gemaghelyan recently offered this bleak assessment of
where the conflict, which has already killed up to 30,000 people and
displaced over a million more, seems to be heading:
Contemporary ethnic conflicts are rarely resolved through high-level
negotiations alone. Yet, for almost 20 years now the so-called
Nagorno-Karabakh peace process has been limited to just that –
official negotiations — with all the other dynamics in the region
bringing the sides closer to war than to peace. The sides are engaged
in an ever-escalating arm race; the education and media in Armenia,
Azerbaijan and Nagorno-Karabakh are functioning as well-oiled
propaganda machines dehumanizing the other, portraying the conflict as
primordial, existential and insolvable, and raising generations of
youth ready to kill. The speeches of politicians serve the same
purpose. The two most outrageous yet typical cases include the widely
referenced by Azerbaijani media quote of the former Armenian president
Kocharyan about “ethnic incompatibility between Armenians and
Azerbaijanis;” meanwhile the Armenian media quotes the current
Azerbaijani president Aliyev as referring to the “Armenians of the
world” as enemies of Azerbaijan. Any political debate within either
society about the conflict and compromises necessary to resolve the
conflict are non-existent and voicing anything but a maximalist
position is a taboo.
The Safarov pardon won’t help calm the region’s tensions. The head of
NATO has already expressed concern over the decision. But, within
Azerbaijan, Safarov has been feted as a national hero, and the
executive secretary of the country’s ruling party has even ominously
linked the officer’s release with eventual victory over Armenia.
“Ramil is released, next is the liberation of Karabakh,” he said.
Azerbaijan’s pardon, which comes in the context of an already
nerve-racking geopolitical dynamic, is nationalist politics at its
best, defiance epitomized.