Armenia's WikiLeak sensation came in the form of allegations about arms transfers to Iran. Azerbaijan took a knock on relations with Iran, Turkey and Russia. Never one to be left behind, Georgia has also jumped on the WikiLeaks bandwagon with alleged US embassy cables that blame the 2008 war with Russia on breakaway South Ossetia.
Georgian media have cited WikiLeaks for the documents, but there's just one catch -- the cables cannot be found on WikiLeaks, nor have any of the site's partner media organizations yet published them.
Georgian blogs which have re-posted the alleged cables do not provide a
link to a WikiLeaks source or otherwise identify how they found the
information.
Georgian news outlets, though, do not seem to have any qualms about this contradiction. Nor do local analysts appear to doubt the documents' authenticity.
WikiLeaks could not be reached to verify that the information came from its own site. The website, reportedly the target of cyber attacks, was not fully functional on November 29.
A case of leaking before WikiLeaking? We do not know.
Greater clarity about the WikiLeaks connection appears to exist in the case of Georgia’s neighbors, Azerbaijan and Armenia.
The Armenian presidential administration and foreign ministry declined to comment to RFE/RL about a 2008 letter in which US Deputy Secretary of State John Negroponte allegedly had warned about the possibility of sanctions if alleged arms re-exports to Iran did not stop.
The Azerbaijani government, though, has already moved to nip in the bud a WikiLeak cable that reports President Ilham Aliyev as describing Russian President Dmitry Medvedev as a “new-generation intellectual” engaged in an ongoing turf war with Prime Minister Vladimir Putin.
“The two heads [Medvedev's and Putin’s -- ed] cannot be boiled in one pot,” the cable reports Aliyev as saying.
Aliyev supposedly went on to criticize Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan for being naïve and promoting moderate Islam, and to complain about security provocations from Iran.
In an interview with the Azerbaijani news agency APA, Novruz Mammadov, head of the administration's international relations department, claimed to have no recollection of the cited comments from Aliyev's February 2010 meeting with Burns. With an eye on the December 1-2 OSCE summit in Kazakhstan, he instead put the cable down to an attempt by unidentified "forces" at stirring up trouble.
"This is a dangerous trend," he concluded.
Giorgi Lomsadze is a journalist based in Tbilisi, and author of Tamada Tales.
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