Perhaps to be seasoned with a touch of Iran? Not exactly the closest of chums, Baku and Tehran this year have been engaged in an energetic sparring match on everything from Iran's alleged plans for terrorist attacks to Azerbaijan's alleged plans for a gay pride parade.
The news from Azerbaijan's less-than-chatty pro-government media outlets about the Clinton talks is terse, however, and does not mention Iran. It essentially boils down to one word: "success."
Just as Clinton left Georgia, though, Iran's Tbilisi embassy issued a statement seeking to clarify matters for Georgians about Tehran’s confrontation with the West over its nuclear interests.
The embassy instructed locals not to be misled by supposed media misrepresentation of Iran's nuclear program, which, Tehran insists, is an entirely harmless extracurricular activity.
Georgia’s hopes to join NATO, reclaim Abkhazia and South Ossetia, and
other running foreign policy matters were the key moments of US
Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton’s June 4-5 drop-in on Georgia,
but her visit had implications for domestic political struggles as
well.
With Georgia's parliamentary elections set for October, all of the
country’s main political players hope for some public display of
Washington’s support. Before Clinton swung by, opposition tycoon Bidzina Ivanishvili had hoped to steal her away a bit from the warm embrace of her host (and his arch-rival) Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili for an intimate tête-à-tête. But it was not to be.
Clinton chose to get the lowdown on Georgian politics from a less up-close-and-personal sit-down with NGOs and a group meeting with opposition leaders. Ivanishvili was represented at the meeting by allies in his Georgian Dream coalition and the chairperson of the group, Manana Kobakhidze.
He had earlier indicated that he does not want to share his Clinton time with leaders of political minority groups who are not part of the Georgian Dream and whom he describes as a "fake opposition."
But looks like Ivanishvili's envoy, Kobakhidze, did not exactly fade into the woodwork. She claimed that Clinton inquired why Ivanishvili refuses to make use of the government offer -- now sealed in the constitution as an amendment -- which would allow the billionaire to run in the parliamentary election as, yes, a European Union citizen.
Three Armenian soldiers were killed by gunfire from neighboring Azerbaijani just as US Secretary of State Hilary Rodham Clinton was about to go country-hopping in the South Caucasus.
Clinton arrived in Yerevan today and, after a stop in Georgia, is due in Baku on June 6.
To hear the Azerbaijani news service APA tell it, the “preventive measures,” which wounded three Armenian soldiers as well, were directed at stopping the Armenian military from infiltrating Azerbaijan from Armenia's northern Tavush region.
But, as is the standard case in Caucasus countries hosting Clinton, you need to tune into the news on the other side of the conflict line for the second side of the story.
Armenian news reported that the Armenians died in a shootout as they tried to halt an infiltration from Azerbaijan. “Thanks to [the] courage[ous] actions of the soldiers… [the] enemy was drawn back,” ArmenPress cited Armenia’s Ministry of Defense as saying.
The not-so-frozen Armenian-Azerbaijani conflict over the breakaway Nagorno-Karabakh region is most definitely going to be discussed with Madam Secretary in both places.
Civil rights as well. An area where there's a lot to chat about with both sides; Georgia, too.
Eurovision may now be over, but the controversy over Azerbaijan's freedom-of-speech practices keeps grooving on.
The latest matters at hand kicked off with the burlesque. Norwegian-Iranian satirist Amir Asgharnejad, a sort of Norwegian version of Borat, claimed he was stripped and forced by Azerbaijani policemen to step on an Iranian flag in the Baku airport, Norwegian media reported. Norway reportedly nearly pulled its Eurovision contestant, Tooji, out of the contest over the incident and a diplomatic exchange is ongoing.
In the run-up to Eurovision, Asgharnejad, who has a comedy news show on Norwegian public television, pretended to be a reporter from Iran and dispatched several tongue-in-cheek video reports from Baku, one of which described Azerbaijan as a "lousy country" that "has lived in the shadow of great Iran," and is now busy "draining the earth for oil" with help from "their Satan worshiping partners from the West."
Such humor was reportedly lost on Baku, which is engaged in a longstanding face-off with Tehran over issues of Islam, pop and homosexuality. Baku denies that airport police mistreated Asgharnejad or any other member of Norway's delegation, but has stopped short of an apology.
On May 26, the Norwegian ambassador to Baku, Elring Skonsberg, went to the Azerbaijani foreign ministry to clarify matters. “I emphasized that freedom of speech is very important in every democratic society. We agree on that,” Skonsberg was quoted by The Norway Post as saying.
After securing support from an archipelago of Pacific island nations for the independence of breakaway Abkhazia and South Ossetia from Georgia, Moscow may now have netted a bigger catch -- Serbia.
During his visit to Moscow last week, Serbia's new president, Tomislav Nikolić, promised to push for recognition of the duo's independence in the Serbian parliament; a pledge that sparked optimism in Abkhazia. And, by now comfortably settled into its role in the two breakaway regions, Russia has made plain that it's happy to sweeten the deal.
Nikolić’s promise was followed by Russian President Vladimir Putin promising to lend $800 million to Serbia, which he described as Russia's “traditional partners” and “soul mates."
Other Russian soul mates, the South Pacific countries of Nauru, Tuvalu and Vanuatu, also received or are believed to have received gifts from Moscow, but the Kremlin maintains their recognitions of the independence of the two Russian-guarded territories came from the heart.
Georgia may not have $800 million to spare, but Tbilisi also sees Belgrade as a soul mate.
Deputy Foreign Minister Nino Kalandadze noted that Georgia and Serbia share an Orthodox Christian faith (for that matter, so do Georgia and Russia), and an aspiration to integrate with the European Union. Beyond guilt-tripping Serbia's government into respecting Georgia’s territorial integrity, Tbilisi expressed hope that Belgrade will not choose to buck the EU’s position on the Georgian breakaways.
When music talents battled for the title of Europe’s best pop act in Baku at the 2012 Eurovision Song Contest last week, little did they know that there was a parallel battle going on backstage between alleged Wahhabi terrorists and Azerbaijan's security forces.
Azerbaijani officials today claimed that they busted an Islamist terror group and took out its leader just as they plotted to bomb the music show, assassinate President Ilham Aliyev, and blow up a couple of mosques and five-star hotels into the bargain.
As with previous reported cases of planned terror attacks, Azerbaijani’s ever-alert security officials are always a step ahead of the villains, but prefer not to share many details. Forty members of the group, allegedly based in Russia's North Caucasus, were arrested, while their leader, a certain Vugar Padarov, was killed in a shootout, the government claims.
Georgia's standardized university admissions tests could be in trouble after the controversial sacking of the national point-woman for the exams, a decision that prompted much of her staff to resign in protest. As with most big news here in Georgia these days, a connection to billionaire/opposition leader Bidzina Ivanishvili was immediately made.
The surprise May 28 firing of Maia Miminoshvili, the head of the National Exams Center, came at a very inauspicious time – on the eve of university admissions tests and the morning after a large anti-government rally hosted by Ivanishvili in downtown Tbilisi. Saakashvili skeptics quickly linked her dismissal to the fact that her son and daughter-in-law had attended the rally, which marked the kickoff of preparations by Ivanishvili's Georgian Dream coalition for this October's parliamentary vote.
A terse statement on the website of the Ministry of Science and Education indicated that Miminoshvili's dismissal was motivated by her policy disagreements with Minister of Science and Education Dimitri Shashkin.
Mininoshvili has been the face of Georgia’s progress away from the age of notoriously corrupt, university-specific exams, when a call to a professor friend and offerings of cash, cakes and roasted pigs opened the doors to higher education. The introduction of tightly monitored standardized national tests helped do away with that tradition, but some of the school reforms have not been very popular.
The amendment allows Georgian-born European Union citizens, who have lived in Georgia for at least five years (read billionaire opposition leader Bidzina Ivanishvili), to take part as candidates in elections (but only for three years). The government, which stripped Ivanishvili of his Georgian citizenship immediately after he announced plans to challenge President Mikheil Saakashvili, says the amendment should put an end to accusations that it's trying unfairly to keep its most deep-pocketed foe out of this October's parliamentary election.
But, with the amendment now just a presidential signature away from becoming law, Ivanishvili says he does not need any such constitutional sops. He urged President Saakashvili not to put his signature on the amendment. “The Constitution is really being changed by one man and for one man,” Ivanishvili wrote in an open letter to the president. “But this man is not me. It is you.”
The billionaire said that if the government does not scrap the constitutional change, he will not participate in the upcoming election. Your move, Misha.
Azerbaijan made the trip to the May 20-21 Euro-Atlantic defense pow-wow in Chicago, and Georgia all but rode a rocket there. But Armenia stayed home.
And not because -- to borrow the dating excuse of an earlier generation of Americans -- it needed to wash its hair.
Armenia is Russia’s economic and military protégé in the Caucasus, and some Armenian wonks believe that President Serzh Sargsyan was a no-show in Chicago as a courtesy move to the Kremlin.
But Yerevan says that the real turn-off for Sargsyan was the gathering’s reiteration of the alliance’s commitment to the territorial integrity of nations. In plain words and as far as Armenia is concerned, this means it should let Azerbaijan take back Sargsyan's native land of breakaway Nagorno Karabakh.
“We remain committed in our support of the territorial integrity, independence, and sovereignty of Armenia, Azerbaijan, Georgia and Republic of Moldova,” the 28-member bloc said. The declaration does not mention the right of self-determination which Armenia advocates in the Karabakh conflict resolution talks. The right to self-determination and the right to territorial integrity -- contradictory though at times they may seem -- are both principles that guide the internationally-mediated discussions.
“Apart from harming the Karabakh peace talks, this may pose a threat to the precarious stability in the South Caucasus,” Armenian Foreign Minister Edward Nalbandian said in reference to the statement.
What happens if European pop music and Islamic fundamentalism -- two equally powerful forces -- come head to head in Baku this week? Signs of a sequins-versus-turbans face-off already are emerging, as Azerbaijan, the host of the Eurovision 2012 Song Contest, does battle with a steady stream of tongue-lashing from neighboring Iran.
Apparently, Tehran has put aside its earlier worries of a possible Western attack on its nuclear facilities to focus on the more pressing matter of a syncopated saturnalia with gay overtones erupting to Iran's north.
The words "Azerbaijan" and "gay pride" are not often seen together, but one senior Azerbaijani presidential administration official nonetheless felt the need to clarify matters for Iran.
“We are hosting a song contest, not a gay parade,” bristled Ali Hasanov, head of the administration's political and public policy department and Azerbaijan's de-facto point-man for all Eurovision PR matters. “I do not know who got this idea into their heads in Iran.”
