Just like the rest of us, Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev, Armenian President Serzh Sargsyan, and Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili all want to start off 2011 on the right foot. Here’s what the South Caucasus’ three tamadas-in-chief pledged to accomplish (with some paraphrasing) as they raised a toast to the New Year:
* To make more money from oil and gas. While everyone last year was whining about the financial crisis, Azerbaijan's economy (officially) grew by five percent, fueled by 51 million tons of oil and 27 million cubic meters of natural gas.
*To share the wealth. Focus on social programs: schools, pensions, healthcare, that kind of thing.
*To regain control (peacefully) over the breakaway Nagorno-Karabakh enclave and to prevent it from becoming another Armenian state. One such state -- allegedly also situated on historic Azerbaijani territory -- is bad enough, the presidential thinking appears to go.
*To make more friends among foreign countries and international institutions.
*To plant more trees. Last year, Azerbaijan planted more than 6 million trees – an historic first, said Aliyev.
*To drink more water. Azerbaijan now has the means to bring drinking water to 300,000 rural residents.
In a bid to boost dwindling fish populations, Armenia has ordered all fish hooks out of Lake Sevan, one of the world's largest high-altitude lakes and Armenia's biggest fresh-water source.
As of December 5, no boats are allowed on the 940-square-kilometer lake. As a holiday concession, the fishing ban will be partly lifted from December 28-31 -- bad news for the carp and the crawfish -- but then will be reinforced until late January. Catching other types of fish will be prohibited throughout the entire period.
Environmentalists have long contended that years of unrestrained fishing and water drainage have caused a dramatic reduction in the lake's fish population and water levels. Carp populations have dropped from 30,000 tons in 1980 to just 170 tons in the recent years, Armenian environmentalists say.
Struggling to mitigate the environmental problems, the Armenian government has set up a group to save Sevan's eco-system. One of the prime tasks ahead -- increasing water levels by 20 centimeters per year.
Two men read stories about violence against women at an exhibition in Yerevan's Charles Aznavour Square organized on November 29 by the Women's Rights Center.
The exhibition aimed to raise public awareness of domestic violence in Armenia and how to prevent it. Cutout silhouettes of nine women attached with true stories of domestic violence were arranged in the square for pedestrians to view.
Anahit Hayrapetyan is a freelance photojournalist based in Yerevan.
Armenia got a dressing-down from the U.S. for selling arms to Iran, Azerbaijan has reservations about embarking on a U.S.-sponsored military "train and equip" program and also would oppose the U.S. fomenting unrest in Iran's ethnic Azeri regions. Those are some of the early revelations, from world of Eurasian security issues, in the first tranche of the latest Wikileaks data dump.
One State Department cable from December 2008 describes how in 2003 Armenia "facilitated Iran's purchase of rockets and machine guns," and those weapons were later found to have been used in an attack in Iraq by Shiite militants that killed one U.S. soldier and wounded six others. According to the cable (via The Guardian):
The direct role of high-level Armenian officials and the link of the weapons to an attack on U.S. forces make this case unique and highly troubling. These transfers may provide a basis for sanctions pursuant to U.S. legal authorities. We propose a series of steps that Armenia will need to take to prevent future transfers, which will be weighed in the consideration of sanctions. We hope to use the threat of sanctions as a tool to generate Armenian responsiveness so that we will not be forced to impose sanctions measures.
The cable also relays a letter from then-Deputy Defense Secretary John Negroponte to Armenian President Serzh Sargsyan, threatening sanctions if Armenia doesn't clean up its act:
Notwithstanding the close relationship between our countries, neither the Administration nor the U.S. Congress can overlook this case. By law, the transfer of these weapons requires us to consider whether there is a basis for the imposition of U.S. sanctions. If sanctions are imposed, penalties could include the cutoff of U.S. assistance and certain export restrictions.
So what was behind Armenian President Serzh Sargsyan's decision to skip the NATO summit last weekend in Lisbon? The president's office said it was in protest of the language of the NATO joint communique, which emphasizes the principle of territorial integrity in resolving the conflicts of the South Caucasus, which would favor Azerbaijan's position in the disputed territory of Nagorno Karabakh.
But that language was the same as in the communique issued after the 2008 NATO summit. So why protest now?
I asked Emil Sanamyan, editor of the Armenian Reporter newspaper, and he pointed out that in May, Sargsyan went to NATO and asked them to follow the OSCE's three principles in Nagorno Karabakh, which include people's right to self-determination as well as territorial integrity and non-use of force. (Self-determination is the principle that favors the Armenian side, since Karabakh's population is Armenian, while nominally it remains part of Azerbaijani territory.) From Sargsyan's press conference at NATO:
During the meeting I also emphasized the need and importance for a balanced approach by NATO to the resolution of the Nagorno-Karabakh process. I expressed hope that future statements about NATO and documents of NATO on the Nagorno-Karabakh will be in keeping with the ministerial statement of the OSCE issued in December 2009, which evenly represents all three of the key underlying principles.
In light of those remarks, Samanyan suggested several possible motives behind Sargsyan's refusal to go to the summit:
If you take reasons provided at face value it is possible that Armenia from now on will take a tougher line on any perceived endorsement of Azerbaijan's claims on Nagorno Karabakh.
President Ilham Aliyev of Azerbaijan arrives in Lisbon for the NATO summit; his Armenian counterpart stayed home
While most of the headlines from the just-concluded NATO summit in Lisbon have focused on the news that the alliance would remain in Afghanistan through 2014, and probably longer, behind the scenes there was plenty of action on the Eurasia front, as well.
Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili went to the summit, and got a much-coveted meeting with his U.S. counterpart, Barack Obama, and afterwards he took great pains to emphasize how special and unique the meeting was (via Civil.ge):
“I am very satisfied with this meeting,” Saakashvili told a group of Georgian journalists in Lisbon after meeting with President Obama late on November 19 evening. “As you know this was President Obama’s only meeting here at NATO summit, apart his meetings with [Afghan] President Karzai and with the hosts [referring to Portuguese leaders] – and you know that Afghanistan tops the agenda of this summit; actually he had no other meetings here except of these ones. Of course this is already in itself an important message.”
The White House also notes that Obama met with Turkish President Abdullah Gul. And the Kazakhstan state news agency Kazinform says that its president, Nursultan Nazarbayev, also met with Obama, but no one else, including the White House, seems to be reporting that.
Looks like Joe Biden is in the State Department's doghouse for comments he made about the Armenian genocide and Armenia-Turkey protocols. After several days of silence, and just after EurasiaNet went to "press" with a story on the controversy, the US Embassy in Yerevan emailed a statement to reporters saying, essentially, that Biden wasn't telling the truth when he said that Armenian President Serzh Sargsyan asked the U.S. to "not force" the touchy issue of recognition of the Armenian genocide. The statement, in full:
The Vice President and President Sargsian spoke twice in April 2009. In these calls, the Vice President told President Sargsian the United States believes that the normalization of relations with Turkey and the opening of borders would provide a path to a better future for Armenia and expressed the support of the United States for his leadership. The Vice President expressed the Obama Administration’s support for a Swiss proposal for a joint Armenia-Turkish statement on progress made toward normalizing relations. President Sargsian did not raise the issue of the content of President Obama’s statement for Armenian Remembrance Day or seek a delay in consideration of House Resolution 252. Instead, the discussions between Vice President Biden and President Sargsian that were recently referenced by the Vice president were about the need to take immediate steps to improve Armenian-Turkish relations. The two leaders agreed that there should be no preconditions to normalizing relations between Armenia and Turkey.
Emphasis added.
The fact that they sent this out at 2 pm on a Friday is telling: Friday afternoon is the traditional Washington time to announce something you don't want to become news.
Armenia has set running the world’s allegedly longest cable car line just about a month after the Caucasus country produced the world’s largest chocolate bar.
The 25-person cabins on October 16 took their first passengers, including the country’s President Serzh Sargsyan, on an 11-minute aerial journey to the ancient mountaintop monastery complex of Tatev, one of Armenia's main tourist attractions. Called the Wings of Tatev, the cable line stretches 5.7 kilometers over a gorge, hills and forests near the Iranian border. “[W]e do not aim to impress anyone, rather this is aimed at reviving the area’s economic and cultural life,” President Sargsyan commented at the opening.
The government intends to ask Guinness World Records to recognize the cable car line as a world record, The Associated Press reported.
Visitors to the region can also check out the world’s highest flag in next-door rival Azerbaijan or the world's allegedly oldest granny in neighboring Georgia. The three countries may not be the biggest places to visit, but they compensate by making frequent use of superlative adjectives -- perhaps another world record in the making?
Azerbaijan is pressing for an official United Nations response to a diplomatic incident at the Armenian mission in New York.
The source of Azerbaijan’s ire was the Armenian mission’s recent move to fly the flag of separatist-minded Nagorno-Karabakh.
“It has been revealed and properly documented that on September 27… the mission of the Republic of Armenia … installed two flags on its premises.., namely the national flag of the Republic of Armenia and a piece of colored stuff or rag purported to be a ‘flag’ of the ethnically constructed subordinate separatist entity, the so-called ‘Nagorno-Karabakh Republic,’” Azerbaijan’s UN envoy Agshyn Mehtyev wrote in a letter sent to UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon.
The Karabakh banner flew for only a few hours, reportedly coming down due to Azerbaijani pressure. Baku, however, doesn’t seem inclined to drop the matter. Azerbaijani officials believe the Armenian action violated the UN Charter, and therefore they are seeking an official UN response.
Hazing in post-Soviet militaries is unfortunately common. What's less common is someone getting punished for it, but that's what's happening in Armenia, where an officer was arrested and faces a sentence of up to five years for beating a young soldier. And that's at least in part thanks to the efforts of Armenian activist bloggers, who kept pushing the story until the Defense Ministry was forced to act:
The Armenian Defense Ministry officially confirmed on Wednesday the identity of an army officer who was arrested last week for abusing his soldiers and is now facing up to five years in prison.
The arrest followed the circulation of an amateur Youtube video that shows a uniform-clad man hitting and humiliating two army conscripts during what looks like a picnic. The footage caused public outrage, prompting the Armenian military to order an inquiry.
The Defense Ministry initially questioned its veracity and said those who posted it on the Internet are keen to “discredit” the Armed Forces. Subsequent media reports said military investigators tracked down the officer shown in the clip.
As EurasiaNet reported just earlier this month, the Armenian MoD had been taking stronger action against hazing even before this video came out. But the existence of video makes it much harder for those who are inclined to reflexively defend the army to deny that hazing is a problem. (The same thing happened in Azerbaijan a couple of years ago.) While the promise of cyberactivism can often be exaggerated, this is one case where there's room for optimism.
