NY TIMES: A HERO’S EELCOME FOR A CONVICTED KILLER REIGNITES TENSIONS
tert.am
05.09.12
By Ellen Barry
Ramil Safarov stepped uncertainly off the plane in his native
Azerbaijan last Friday, returning home after spending eight years in a
Hungarian prison for a gruesome murder. But it took only a few minutes
for the celebrations to begin. There was a pardon, a new apartment,
eight years of back pay, a promotion to the rank of major and the
status of a national hero.
Mr Safarov, 35, was already famous because of his crime. Eight years
ago, carrying an ax, he crept into a dormitory room in Hungary where
an Armenian serviceman, a fellow student in a NATO-sponsored English
class, slept, and nearly decapitated him.
But now Mr Safarov will almost certainly go down in history for
the way he was freed, an episode people have started to call “The
Safarov Affair.”
The backlash has embarrassed Hungary, which agreed to extradite Mr
Safarov on the assumption that he would serve at least 25 years of
a life sentence. It has set off protests in Budapest and enraged
Armenia, where activists pelted the Hungarian Embassy with eggs and
burned Hungarian flags.
And it threatens to end the lengthy peace process that has kept
Azerbaijan and Armenia from sliding back into bloody conflict over
the disputed territory of Nagorno-Karabakh. Mr. Safarov, who was a
boy during the war with Armenia, embodies the hatred that has pooled
deeply in the public as leaders have sat through rounds of faltering
negotiations.
“If we have no process, what’s left is a vacuum, which gets filled
with an escalation toward war; we’ll see how the Armenian side reacts,
but that’s my fear,” said Thomas de Waal, a Caucasus specialist at
the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in Washington. “It’s
suddenly more dangerous.”
Mr Safarov, then a lieutenant, and his victim, Lt. Gurgen Markarian,
got to know each other in Budapest as members of an English-language
course organized by NATO’s Partnership for Peace, which was developed
to build ties with former Soviet allies in Eastern Europe.
Mr Safarov told the police that his Armenian classmates had insulted
him and that he had grown increasingly angry, finally buying an ax and
waiting until before dawn one day to carry out his plan. He passed
those hours by finishing his English homework and taking a bath,
according to a transcript of the interview published by Armenian
activists.
After Mr Safarov was arrested, Azerbaijan’s Foreign Ministry released
a statement describing his family’s losses during the war with Armenia,
and suggesting that Lieutenant Markarian had goaded him.
“There are indications that the Armenian servicemen repeatedly insulted
the honor and dignity of the Azerbaijani officer and citizen,”
the statement said. “All this would have inevitably influenced the
suspect’s emotional state.”
Oil-rich Azerbaijan carried out a sustained lobbying effort to
extradite Mr. Safarov from Hungary, over the protests of Armenian
officials. The Hungarian government, under pressure to explain its
decision to turn over Mr. Safarov, has said it received written
assurance from Azerbaijan that he would not be paroled until he had
served 25 years in Lieutenant Markarian’s murder.
On Friday, though, he was pardoned by Azerbaijan’s president, Illham
H. Aliyev. Mr. Safarov’s presence so electrified citizens that all
day strangers congratulated one another on the streets of Baku.
It is not clear how the Armenian government will respond to Mr.
Safarov’s release. “The Armenians must not be underestimated,”
President Serzh Sargsyan warned on Sunday. “We don’t want a war, but
if we have to, we will fight and win,” he said. “We are not afraid
of murderers, even those who enjoy the highest patronage.”
Richard Giragosian, an analyst based in Yerevan, Armenia, said that
he doubted that either side was seeking a war, but that unfolding
events risked “a war by accident.”
An Armenian opposition party on Tuesday proposed formally recognizing
Nagorno-Karabakh as independent – a step that would signal the final
collapse of peace talks that have long been encouraged by Russia
and the West. Armenia could ratchet up the confrontation by opening
an airport in Stepanakert, the capital of the disputed territory,
or by responding overwhelmingly to cease-fire violations.
“Each side is escalating,” Mr. Giragosian said. “It’s almost like a
matter of physics. For every action there is a reaction.”
Mr. Aliyev, Azerbaijan’s president, has invested vast sums in his
country’s international standing, most recently serving as host of
the Eurovision Song Contest, but waves of condemnation have emerged
since Friday – most swiftly from the United States, which issued
statements saying officials in Washington were “extremely troubled”
and “deeply concerned.” On Monday, Russia’s Foreign Ministry expressed
“deep concern, noting the case’s “extreme atrocity.”
Zerdusht Alizadeh, an opposition politician and analyst at the Helsinki
Citizens’ Assembly, said Mr. Aliyev was looking ahead to elections
next year, and had little to show for the drawn-out efforts to mediate
the conflict in Nagorno-Karabakh. Mr. Safarov’s homecoming, he said,
was a far simpler way to declare victory.
“Giving so much support to a hero – a person who killed an Armenian –
makes the president a hero, too,” he said.
By Tuesday, though, the backlash was dominating the day’s news
coverage, and Mr. Safarov had made no further public appearances.
The episode, Mr. Giragosian said, was a reminder of the depth and
force of the ethnic grievances left behind as the Soviet empire
receded across Europe.
“It’s almost like the Balkans was – we had no idea of the barbarity
of these people,” he said. “Holding a grudge for 100 years is nothing.
It’s like a blood vendetta. At the same time, there are wider
implications; it increases an already worrisome trend toward possible
renewed conflict here.”