With two weeks to go until Azerbaijan hosts the Eurovision 2012 Song Contest, official preparations are wrapping up in Baku. But the Azerbaijani government is not the only party getting ready for the event. Civil society activists are hard at work, too.
The State Oil Company of Azerbaijan is looking to become an international energy producer. And in its first move beyond the Caspian Basin, SOCAR is turning to Israel.
A pending court case is refocusing attention on the issue of religious freedom in Azerbaijan. Officials are seeking to revoke the registration of a small Christian community in Baku. If successful, it would mark the first closure of what had once been an officially recognized denomination, since new registration procedures came into force in 2009.
Azerbaijan and Turkey are showing that even for the closest of strategic allies it’s not always smooth sailing. And it’s not especially a surprise that energy issues are what’s causing the two cultural cousins to bicker.
Ministry of National Security spokesperson Arif Babayev told EurasiaNet.org over the phone that “the operation against terrorists in Ganja is not over yet.” Babayev did not provide more details, but said that the ministry will issue an official statement in the evening.
Turan news agency reported that an explosion this morning in the residential area of Mahrasa Bagi in Ganja had killed two people. Unnamed local sources in the city told the agency that a suicide bomber with a grenade or explosives-laden belt had committed the act.
The Ministry of National Security’s involvement in the events in Ganja underlines the claim of terrorism, rather than an otherwise-explicable event. If the suicide-bomber version is confirmed, the explosion would rank as the first case of an attack by a suicide-bomber in Azerbaijan.
Local news wires, quoting unnamed sources in law enforcement agencies, report that the MNS was taking action against religious extremists (termed “Wahhabis”), originally from Azerbaijan’s northern Qakh region, who had rented an apartment in Ganja.
During the detention operation, one of the targeted individuals allegedly blew himself up, killing MNS Lieutenant-Colonel Elshad Guliyev in the process. The five people wounded included law-enforcement officers. The victims’ bodies have been flown to Baku by helicopter, the MNS said.
Azerbaijani military and political analysts are disputing a March 28 report on an American website that alleges Israel has gained access to airbases in Azerbaijan for possible use in an attack against Iran.
For the first time since President Ilham Aliyev assumed the presidency in Azerbaijan in 2003, popular pressure, specifically the recent protest in the northern city of Guba, has caused officials in Baku to blink. The question now is whether the government’s efforts to quickly redress citizens’ complaints was an exception, or a new rule.
An unexpected riot in the northern Azerbaijani city of Guba on March 1 has seriously shaken up Azerbaijan’s usually calm political situation, and reportedly led to the dismissal of a regional government official appointed by President Ilham Aliyev.
Several thousand people gathered this morning in front of the main government building in Guba, about 180 kilometers north of Baku, to demand the immediate resignation of the region’s government head, Rauf Habibov, over offensive remarks he had made a few days earlier. In a video posted on YouTube, Habibov was shown charging that the “residents of Guba sold their city for 30-40 manats. They sold their country, their land, their family.”
The reason for the remarks is not clear, but, apparently, it proved enough to send local men out into the streets.
Chanting "Resign!" and "Ungrateful!," protesters -- some carrying portraits of President Aliyev in an apparent attempt to emphasize that they were not opposing the central government itself -- laid siege to the Guba government building, reporters on the scene told EurasiaNet.org.
Local police and reinforcements from neighboring areas proved unable to disperse the crowd. Instead, by mid-afternoon, large numbers of interior ministry troops, equipped with three water-jet machines, three armored personnel carriers, and three armored vehicles, moved in. But by that time, protesters had already burned a local government guesthouse and smashed a metal fence. The next target was Habibov’s house, which was burned completely. No one was injured.
There were full-page newspaper ads in New York City, films in Paris, and commemorations and marches from Argentina to Latvia. Twenty years after a massacre of ethnic Azeri residents in the Nagorno-Karabakh village of Khojaly, Azerbaijan is pressing a campaign to have the 1992 slaughter recognized as an act of genocide.
As the showdown over Iranian nuclear ambitions intensifies, political analysts in Azerbaijan are urging the government to deepen the country’s ties with Israeli and Western security structures.
