With nine months to go before Baku hosts the Eurovision pop-music competition, transparency concerns are arising about Azerbaijani government expenditures on the event.
With more than a year to go before the expiration of Russia’s lease for Azerbaijan’s Gabala radar station, Baku and Moscow are already haggling about a renewal, EurasiaNet.org has learned. Amid Russia’s ongoing tussle with Washington over a European anti-missile defense system, Azerbaijan is expected to try and squeeze Moscow for more cash in order to extend the lease.
In a sign of religion’s growing influence in the South Caucasus, the founding of an organization to represent Georgia’s Muslim population has sparked an emotional face-off with the Soviet-era body for the region’s Muslims, the Baku-based Caucasus Muslim Board.
Azerbaijan’s cooperation with the North Atlantic Treaty Organization may not be progressing at a brisk clip, but some local analysts believe that the country’s accession to the Non-Aligned Movement last month put an even bigger question mark over the future of Azerbaijan’s Euro-Atlantic integration.
Once again, Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev and his Armenian counterpart, Serzh Sargsyan, failed during their recent summit to reconcile their differences on the Nagorno-Karabakh peace process. If this is starting to sound familiar, it should. The two countries have spent almost four years getting nowhere on finalizing the supposed “basic principles” for a Karabakh peace deal.
At the age of 14, Kifayat Mammadova was married and already an expectant mother. A year and a half later, her marriage had failed, her child had died, and she was on the road to Baku from her village in the mountains of southern Azerbaijan in search of a new life.
In a sign that Islam’s role in Azerbaijan may be slowly evolving, the country’s largest and only state-owned bank, the International Bank of Azerbaijan, plans this autumn to open a specialized branch offering limited Islamic banking services.
Could it be that pop music, traditionally viewed by conservative governments as a scourge, is precipitating a thaw in Azerbaijan? Human rights activists in Baku are hopeful that is the case following the recent release of a prominent independent journalist from prison.
Officials in Azerbaijan want to make the act of spreading “misinformation” a “cyber-crime.” Some Azerbaijani civil rights activists worry that the initiative is driven by a desire to restrict Azerbaijani web users’ access to online information.
Two weeks after a surprise pro-hijab protest by scores of Muslim believers outside Azerbaijan’s Ministry of Education, authorities are still trying to figure out who organized the show of defiance.
