The pending return of Washington’s Bush-era Caucasus man, Matthew Bryza, has touched off so much buzz in the region that one might as well turn his last name into a verb.
Following the 2008 Georgian-Russian war, critics both inside and outside the Caucasus charged that Tbilisi, emboldened by an easy bonhomie with the White House Caucasus envoy, ended up challenging Moscow. Now, Armenia is concerned that Baku may be "Bryza'd" as well.
With his appointment as US ambassador to Azerbaijan up for a vote in the US Senate's Foreign Relations Committee on July 22, Azerbaijan and Armenia have headed to Capitol Hill to lobby for and against, respectively, Bryza’s Caucasus homecoming.
The Armenians worry that Bryza, who co-chaired the US-France-Russia mediatory group on the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict, puts territorial integrity above a nation’s right to self-determination; two conflicting directions that shape the Karabakh peace talks.
Describing Bryza as biased against Armenia and overly positive about Baku, an influential Armenian Diaspora group in the US called for a careful review of the diplomat's credentials. Armenian lobby groups, in particulary, believe that the man got a little too chummy with Turkish and Azerbaijani officials while pushing for US-backed energy projects in the region. For this camp, the fact that Bryza’s wife is an ethnic Turk also does not help matters.
Members of the Collective Security Treaty Organization (CSTO) face a delicate task late next month when they meet in Yerevan for one of their regular pow-wows -- how to explain why the CSTO declined to send forces to member-state Kyrgyzstan in June to quell ethnic bloodshed.
The refusal sparked accusations that the organization, intended as an FSU version of NATO, is useless.
Speaking at a July 21 press-conference in Yerevan, the CSTO's Russian secretary-general, Nikolai Bordyuzha, had a ready response to that one: “We have all deemed it inexpedient to invade another state as it would only aggravate tensions,” Bordyuzha explained.
Such considerations, however, did not stop Russia from invading non-CSTO member Georgia in 2008.
But not only Georgia will be keeping a cautious eye on the CSTO shindig to its south.
Good news from Italy for fans of the Nabucco pipeline, the project designed to end Europe’s dependence on Russian natural gas. Plans by Italian energy behemoth ENI to ship gas from Turkmenistan to Azerbaijan comes as a demux ex machina solution for the pipeline, which skeptics believe Azerbaijan alone cannot fill.
After meeting Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev, ENI CEO Paolo Scaroni told The Wall Street Journal on July 20 that he plans to ship between two to three billion cubic meters of compressed natural gas across the Caspian Sea to feed the Azerbaijan-Turkey transit pipeline. The pipeline begins in Azerbaijan and ends in the Turkish city of Erzurum, the proposed launch pad for Nabucco.
The news is of potential interest for Georgia and Romania, which are both looking to set up a similar arrangement across the Black Sea. Unlike ENI’s project, Georgia hopes to start shipping Azerbaijani gas to Romania in a liquefied form -- deep-pocketed investors depending.
Could the South Caucasus come full circle from pre-Soviet federation to post-Soviet confederation?
Georgia this weekend suggested building near-confederative relations with neighboring Azerbaijan to create a one-stop layover point for Asia-Europe energy and cargo transits. Earlier on, Tbilisi made a similar proposal to Armenia. Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili believes that the future of the South Caucasus lies in the creation of a single space to cope together with economic and political challenges.
The ongoing push for integration is reminiscent of the late 1910s when the South Caucasus, an area better known for its penchant for separatism than for integration, had its first fleeting exercise in federalism.
With a capital in Tiflis (today's Tbilisi), the Trans-Caucasian Democratic Federative Republic proclaimed its independence from Russia in 1918, giving its members a brief chance to tackle together the triple whammy of Ottomans, Bolsheviks and Tsarists.
The union soon collapsed and saw its members roll on the ground, fighting, until the Bolsheviks scooped them up, one by one. The break-up created “rivalries over territory and identity that would return to haunt the new, post-Soviet countries some seventy years later,” wrote American historian Charles King in his book "The Ghost of Freedom, a History of the Caucasus."
Now, a few wars and fits of ultra-nationalism later, Georgia has rediscovered the merits of integration, but more than a few ongoing differences stand in the way of the hoped-for post-Soviet reunion. Armenia and Azerbaijan have their 22-year Karabakh complaint, while Armenia and Georgia -- the one looking toward Moscow, the other toward Washington -- are kept at odds over an eons-old rivalry for regional cultural superiority.
It could be a case of dissociative identity disorder. The Singapore-worshipping Georgian government has long promised to lead Georgians into a brave new economic world, where taxes are low, government is meek and the free market reigns supreme. The government even proposed to subject tax hikes to a referendum. Proposed amendments to Georgia's tax code, however, suggest that the government may be gravitating away from its libertarian moorings.
With vital foreign investment on the wane and entrepreneurs' mood sluggish, the government changed its mind about reducing income tax rates from 20 to 15 percent, and proposed to cancel tax privileges for the education and non-governmental sectors.
When teachers fought back, the tax increase was cancelled for schools.
Now NGOs, which enjoy a privileged 12 percent income tax rate, say that plans to increase income taxes to a general 20 percent will hamstring the development of civil society.
Can they prevail? Stay tuned. Parliament will discuss the code changes again on July 21, but a final vote is not expected until the fall.
[Editor's Note: EurasiaNet.org operates under the auspices of the Open Society Institute, a part of the Soros Foundations network. The Open Society Georgia Foundation is a Tbilisi-based non-governmental organization that is a separate part of that network.]
A bleep censor might come in handy for France when Russia and Georgia open their post-Soviet mouths. Since taking on the thankless job of mediating between Moscow and Tbilisi, mannerly French envoys have found themselves in the unlikely world of rapster-style dissing.
Two years ago, when French President Nicolas Sarkozy was trying to convince Vladimir Putin to abort the Russian invasion of Georgia, the Russian prime minister reportedly startled his French guest by sharing plans to hang Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili by his private parts. Now that French Foreign Minister Bernard Kouchner has instructed Tbilisi to make nice with Russia, Saakashvili has cautioned that Georgia will not “lick" its giant neighbor "in one place as some have proposed that we do."
That said, the French must have known that they would be dealing with people who call ‘em as they see ‘em. Putin once famously offered to "wipe out" terrorists in a toilet, while Saakashvili in 2007 suggested that his old-guard domestic critics had been “flushed down” the toilet.
Neither side has patience for French exhortations on restrained conduct because both believe the Paris-brokered cease-fire deal left key issues unresolved. Russia still maintains a tight grip on breakaway Abkhazia and South Ossetia, while Russian hopes of regime change in Georgia never materialized. That means more PG-13 diplomacy coming soon . . .
If you're Azerbaijani and are looking for a name for your child, the Baku authorities have a little something for you -- a list of permitted names that they have taken the trouble to compile.
First names associated with "individuals who have committed aggression against the Azerbaijani people" will be blacklisted by a new color-coded nomenclature that is akin to the American system of terror alert colors.
You are in the clear if you choose a name from the green category; meaning those names that fit Azerbaijan's “national, cultural and ideological” values, Trend news agency reported. Yellow is for "undesirable" names that sound funny in other languages and are "not recommended." Red is for names of aggressors which carry "an insulting meaning in our language."
In theory, that means that "Ali" is green, "Artush" is red and "Astrid" is yellow.
If the name you picked warrants a red alert, the Azerbaijan National Academy of Sciences, which oversaw the scholars working on the first-name alert system, advises that you submit it to the Academy for clearance.
Little more than a week after US Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton took a stroll in Russia’s alleged sphere of influence, reports are emerging that Russian President Dmitry Medvedev may also be packing for the Caucasus. Azerbaijani, Armenian and Russian news media today reported that Medvedev will visit Baku and Yerevan later this summer.
Azerbaijan's 1News.az claims that Medvedev plans to sign a border treaty with Baku during his September visit; Russia's ITAR-TASS reports that Medvedev will head to Yerevan in August for a meeting of the Collective Security Treaty Organization. The summit is reportedly expected in "the second half of August," according to News.am.
The Kremlin has not confirmed the news yet, but such visits could provide a fresh episode in the ongoing soap opera about Washington and Moscow's struggle for influence in the region.
Armenia and Azerbaijan are both trying to maintain a delicate balance between the two big brothers. By contrast, one place in the South Caucasus where Medvedev cannot set his feet, but any US official is always welcome is Georgia.
Several Azerbaijan couples were decorated last week with medals for “love and fidelity” after staying married for over 25 years. At a ceremony dedicated to Russia’s Family, Love and Fidelity Day, which is celebrated on July 8, Azerbaijani officials and representatives of Russian groups in Azerbaijan awarded couples in a bid to "revive good traditions."
Earlier this year, Azerbaijan adopted a law against domestic violence in a bid to squash certain bad traditions. Such brutality against women has largely been a taboo topic. In September 2009, the United Nations' Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination against Women noted that in Azerbaijan “such violence appears to be at times socially legitimized by a culture
of silence and impunity and is socially accepted."
The system, to be set up wherever large numbers of people congregate, is allegedly designed to protect all and sundry from "illegal activities" and to ensure a "fast reaction to emergency situations."
Police, though, appear to have little trouble with making arrests as it is.
A handful of youth activists, who came to protest in front of the presidential administration building on July 8, the one-year anniversary of bloggers Adnan Hajizade and Emin Milli’s detention, was promptly scooped up and shipped off in police cars, Mediaforum.az reported.
Embassies and rights groups have been taking turns to demand the release of Hajizade and Milli, along with newspaper editor Eynulla Fatullayev. Critics view the arrests as an attempt to keep new media from turning into a fresh outlet for criticism of the government. Among others, Norway, the US and the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe have all called on Azerbaijan to release the three men, but, so far, in vain.
