GUEST POST: HUNGARIAN-AZERI-ARMENIAN RELATIONS: THE AXE FACTOR
Registan
Sept 4 2012
This is a guest post by Peter Marton.
The act
Ramil Safarov, a lieutenant in the Azerbaijani army, came to Budapest
in 2004 to study English at a seminar organized by the Hungarian
National Defense University in the framework of NATO’s Partnership
for Peace program. There were participants of various nationalities
attending the course, including Armenians, and after some more cordial
initial encounters, insults were traded between them and the Azeri
officer.
Safarov’s Hungarian defense lawyer would later claim that he is an
exceptionally intelligent young man, as evidenced by his IQ tests, but
in this case his intelligence clearly did not translate into wisdom.
On the night of February 19, 2004 he proceeded to hack to death one of
the Armenian officers, army lieutenant Gurgen Margaryan, with an axe
he had bought the previous day. He then tried to get into the room
where the other Armenian officer was staying, at the same dorm, but
stopped at calling out the officer’s name in front of the locked door
to his room. An Uzbek student put an end to the madness by grabbing
Safarov, calming him down. Together they lit a cigarette.
Safarov hails from the broader region of Nagorno-Karabakh. His family
members had to flee to Baku, and people whom he referred to as his
cousins were killed during the war which clearly traumatized him. In
his own retelling he also added, however, that he did not kill anyone
during the war with Armenia and that for this reason he felt it was
his duty to act this time, feeling this would be a way to get even
for atrocities that Azeris suffered during the conflict at the hands
of Armenians. He also alleged that at one point his victim insulted
the Azeri flag which he saw as particularly offensive – something
that further convinced him to take action. What he then did shocked
even his fellow Azeri student enrolled in the same program.
The murder caused enormous embarrassment for Hungary. A soldier, for
whose security Hungarian authorities had taken responsibility, killed
by another guest of the Hungarian state, indirectly under the auspices
of NATO. In April 2006, Safarov was sentenced to life imprisonment,
and the following year a Hungarian court of appeal upheld the ruling.
As it turned out, however, this was not the last time Ramil Safarov
would cause major problems for Hungary. Although at the second time
when he was to do so, it would not really be by his doing.
Five and a half years later
On August 31, 2012, Hungary extradited Ramil Safarov to Azerbaijan.
Upon the Azeri request for extradition, the Hungarian Ministry of
Public Administration and Justice reportedly sought formal assurance
from its Azeri counterpart that Safarov would duly serve the remainder
of his sentence in Azerbaijan, and received a fax reply, signed by
the Deputy Minister of Justice, stating that as a matter of general
practice sentenced persons who are transferred to Azerbaijan do serve
the remainder of their sentences “without conversion or having to go
through any new judicial procedure.”
According to the Hungarian government’s version of events, the
Hungarian Ministry was at this point satisfied by the Azeri response.
They claim that they had no reason to doubt the intentions of a
country like Azerbaijan, elected as a non-permanent member of the
United Nations Security Council with strong support in the UN General
Assembly (having competed against Hungary, incidentally, and Slovenia
for the slot reserved for Eastern European countries).
With authorization from Prime Minister Viktor Orban, Hungarian
authorities went ahead with the transfer. Upon Safarov’s arrival,
Azeri President Ilham Aliyev immediately pardoned him, and then
promoted him to the rank of major in the Azerbaijani army. In no
time the masses were celebrating his return home on the streets. The
elated deputy chairman and executive secretary of the presidential
New Azerbaijan Party, Ali Akhmedov declared that now that “Ramil was
released, next is the liberation of Karabakh.”
What changed in-between
In a nutshell, Azerbaijan became very important, for Hungary as well
as for others. By the time Ramil Safarov decided to kill his Armenian
schoolmate, plans for what is widely known now as the Nabucco pipeline
were already being considered. Caucasian developments slowly paved the
way for such a project to seem feasible, and this prompted a wave of
engagements in the field energy diplomacy by hitherto passive players,
including Eastern European countries facing the problem of one-sided
dependence on Russian natural gas imports.
Safarov became very important, too. Zahid Oruj, a member of the
Azerbaijani parliament’s national security committee now claims that
the chief reason for the opening of an Azerbaijani embassy in Budapest
was to defend Safarov’s interests and expedite his release. Azeri
diplomats did indeed work hard on this. On numerous occasions they
requested Safarov’s extradition, only to be turned down.
Then the Hungarian government changed, too, with Prime Minister
Viktor Orban’s government coming to power in 2010. The new leadership
inherited problems with state debt and was seeking to address this
challenge through what it called “unorthodox” solutions. In order
to remain loyal to its own, peculiar vision of economic policy,
the government was now interested in seeking unorthodox sources
of debt refinancing as well, as an alternative to the IMF and its
conditionality-based lending. At the same time they were pushing on
with Hungary’s already intense efforts in energy diplomacy. They 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, SOCARindicated 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.
And then Safarov’s extradition took place.
Perceptions
The Hungarian government is left looking either hopelessly naïve or
blatantly cynical in the wake of Safarov’s pardon in Azerbaijan. The
contrast between the two different interpretations gets even starker
when one considers that there may have been occasional talks about
Safarov’s fate between Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban and
Azeri President Ilham Aliyev for over a year, as Novruz Mammadov, the
foreign affairs secretary of the Azeri presidential cabinet now says.
The current Hungarian government version is in line with the former
assumption. Armenian protesters in various capitals from Yerevan
to Washington, for their part, were keen onrunning the point home
that it is the second version – a case of cynicism – that they
believe to be true. Peter Szijjarto, the foreign affairs secretary
of the Prime Minister’s Office in charge of the implementation of
Hungary’s “eastern opening,” engaged in damage control by saying:
“a dull international legal issue and the two countries’ economic
cooperation have no bearing on each other whatsoever.” Meanwhile,
both the Hungarian Government Debt Management Agency and SOFAZ, the
State Oil Fund of Azerbaijandenied the existence of plans for the
issuance or the purchasing of Hungarian sovereign bonds, respectively.
Regardless of this and the Hungarian diplomatic note handed in
protest of the presidential pardon to the Azeri ambassador in
Budapest, Armenia broke off diplomatic ties with Hungary, rather
embarrassingly for a country like Hungary, having, as it does, a
stake in the European Union’s Eastern Partnership. This may be true
even though the Hungarian Armenian National Minority Self-Government
is now saying that the Armenian ambassador to Vienna, Austria, who
would have been accredited to Budapest as well, could not present
his letter of credence to the President of Hungary for over a year,
and that diplomatic ties were thus not functioning really well anyway.
Hard realities
Whatever one thinks of the reasons for Hungary’s decision, there is no
denying the fact that as long as natural gas imports remain important
for the country, it will need to keep the Azeri option alive. And
although calculations regarding this were not necessarily at the core
of the move to extradite Safarov and thus please the Azeri people
and leadership, it now transpires more clearly that popular Azeri
attitudes about Hungary were in fact not very positive.
Ali Akhmedov, in the same speech, quoted above, in which he envisioned
the liberation of Karabakh to follow Ramil Safarov’s release soon,
remembered what happened eight years ago in Budapest in the following
interesting terms: “Both Karabakh, and Ramil became victims of
saboteurs.”
“Saboteur” is an interesting label to apply to a country for sentencing
a murderer. The background to this may perhaps be illustrated by
recent commentary from Azeri political analyist Ilgar Mammadov who
concludes that as Hungary is widely seen in Azerbaijan as a country
where Armenians are integrated into the elite since centuries, “the
case of Safarov was also a strong slap in the face to all holders of
the myth of the power of the Armenian diaspora.”
Ali Akhmedov is now sort-of generously giving credit to Hungary for
“being able to assess” that “in world history no cases of Azerbaijan’s
violence, injustice against any country have been recorded,” and that
therefore “Azerbaijan has the right to expect from the other the same
treatment.” He says he was happy to see that “when there is mind –
no need to use force.”
That such attitudes may change vis-a-vis Hungary now is scarce
consolation for the damage that has been done, not to mention the
morals of the story.
Peter Marton is a lecturer in International Relations at Corvinus
University in Budapest.
http://registan.net/2012/09/04/guest-post-hungarian-azeri-armenian-relations-the-axe-factor/