Experts in Baku are welcoming US President Barack Obama’s decision to appoint longtime Caucasus hand Matthew Bryza as ambassador to Azerbaijan. But many are cautioning that Bryza’s arrival is unlikely to break existing diplomatic logjams.
After an initial denial, officials in Azerbaijan have confirmed that a hospital in Baku is under investigation for performing improper organ culling and transplant operations.
A diplomatic cable dispatched by the US Embassy in Azerbaijan, part of the cache of documents obtained by the WikiLeaks website, compares Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev to two iconic mafia dons from “The Godfather” movie trilogy -- impulsive Sonny Corleone and his brother, the coldly calculating Michael.
A Caspian Sea summit may have been what brought Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to Baku recently, but it was Iran’s bilateral relations with Azerbaijan that commanded a greater share of attention.
Amid the ongoing controversy surrounding Iran’s nuclear program, Azerbaijan appears caught in a delicate balancing act between cooperation with the United States in implementing sanctions against Tehran and the reality of its own longstanding ties to its southern neighbor.
Azerbaijan’s parliament on October 22 approved a military budget of 2.5 billion manats, or about $3.12 billion. That figure is higher than the entire state budget of Baku’s neighbor and longtime foe, Armenia.
Some Baku residents probably did a double-take when the news broke recently: two members of the Armenian Revolutionary Federation-Dashnaktsutiun, a nationalist Armenian party fervently opposed to Azerbaijan’s claims to Nagorno-Karabakh, had arrived in the Azerbaijani capital on a surprise visit.
Energy-rich Azerbaijan may have made gains of late in giving its citizens reliable access to gas and electricity, but on one key front, potable water, the government is lagging. A large percentage, if not a majority, of Azerbaijan’s 8.2 million citizens lacks easy access to potable water.
The US Senate Committee on Foreign Relations has approved the nomination of Matthew Bryza as Washington’s ambassador to Azerbaijan, a post that has been vacant for more than a year. Azerbaijani media energetically heralded the committee vote, although most online outlets misinterpreted it to mean that Bryza had been confirmed as the new US envoy to Baku.
