The breakaway region of Nagorno Karabakh has voted, but, so far as most of the outside world is concerned, it voted in vain. The mediating trio of France, Russia and US reiterated that the territory's May 23 parliamentary election will not be regarded as legitimate. But if anyone nevertheless wants to know how things are shaping up, de facto Prime Minister Ara Harutyunian’s Free Homeland party leads with 46 percent of the vote and is trailed by de facto Parliamentary Speaker Ashot Ghulian’s Democratic Party of Artsakh with 29 percent of voters. Next comes Dashnaktsutiun with 20 percent, while the Communist Party has failed to clear the four-percent threshold, according to preliminary results.
Only Armenia, which protected Nagorno-Karabakh through thick and thin, has hailed the election, calling it a "demonstration of a resolve to live independently."
Seventy-six-year-old Otar Ioseliani may have long ago turned into a genteel Parisian film director, but his inner Georgian comes out even at the Cannes Film Festival. Interviewed by The New York Times about his new out-of-competition film at Cannes, Chantrapas, the arthouse author put down his cigarette to launch into a Russia-bashing tirade.
“The Russians never behaved in the civilized fashion – never,” Ioseliani said. “Look how the English left India, but the Russians won’t leave. They are, well, something else, the whole lot: Putin, Medvedev, and before, Brezhnev, Khrushchev, and Stalin and, the rotter of the lot, Lenin. Before, there was that idiot Czar Nicolas.”
Russians are the neighbors from hell, he summed up. “We don’t hate them, we just hold them in contempt.”
Tired of the Soviet regime’s constant censorship of the films he made in Georgia, Ioseliani immigrated to France in the 1970s to become an acclaimed director of absurdist, cinema-literate films.
While Tbilisi relies on unobtrusive European monitors for its border security, Russia has opted for some tried-and-true Cossacks.
The Russian Federal Security Service (FSB)'s Border Patrol Service will use the renegade paramilitaries, who first manned Russia's southern borders in the 18th century, to help police its recently reopened Upper Lars border checkpoint with Georgia and newly recognized border with South Ossetia. The Cossacks, working in 12-hour shifts of 20 men per border post, will receive a 500-ruble (around $16) per diem for their work.
Not much, but then maybe the Kremlin hopes that Cossack pride about being back on the job, defending Russia's borders, will make up for the pay.
The dominant Democracy Party of Artsakh led by de facto parliamentary speaker Ashot Ghulian, calls for boosting Karabakh’s international profile, Prime Minister Arayik Harutyunyan’s Free Homeland Party runs on a reforms platform, while the nationalist Dashnaktsutiun champions homeland defense and the Communist Party, predictably, calls for the nationalization of strategic industries.
No country has recognized Karabakh's independence, but Azerbaijan, still smarting from the recent Turkish-Armenian rapprochement campaign, nonethless placed on the record that no country should consider the election to be legitimate.
The Organization of the Islamic Conference (OIC) -- a club of Muslim countries that features Azerbaijan among its 57 members -- has declared Armenia the aggressor in the 22-year Azerbaijani-Armenian conflict over the breakaway region of Nagorno Karabakh.
The resolution, adopted at a May 19 OIC meeting in Dushanbe, will be the foundation of Karabakh discussions planned at the Organization’s 2011 summit in Cairo, Egypt. “We must keep raising the issue of Nagorno Karabakh at the OIC meetings, or else we will make a step back,” declared Azerbaijan’s Ambassador to Saudi Arabia Tofik Abdulayev.
The Organization also adopted two other Karabakh resolutions that deplore the alleged destruction of Azerbaijani monuments on Armenian-controlled territory and call for aiding the conflict's Azerbaijani victims.
Armenian officials have not commented to international media about the resolutions, but delivered a jab the day the OIC resolutions came out.
The Karabakh peace process has failed because Azerbaijan has shot down each proposal that comes from American, Russian and French mediators, argued Armenian Deputy Foreign Minister Shavarsh Kocharian.
"[A]n impression is being created that Baku is holding talks with itself, arrives at some acceptable decisions for itself and tries to present its own wish as the result of the negotiations," the peeved Kocharian charged.
Has Georgia really become Washington’s poor relative, who spends hours waiting in the White House lobby while the party is swinging inside? One TIME Magazine reporter makes that argument in The Huffington Post, implying that, when approached by Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili these days, Obama and other Western leaders apologetically point at their watches and run to a meeting with Russia's Dmitri Medvedyev.
Busy trying to cooperate with Russia on nuclear matters, Washington seems increasingly to avoid saying the G-word, and, when it does, the mention is not always quite what Tbilisi had in mind. On May 10, for instance, Obama declared that Georgia is no “obstacle” to proceeding with a US nuclear cooperation pact with Russia.
Granted, old friends like Senator John McCain and ex-Deputy Assistant Secretary of State David Kramer have come out recently to boost the Georgia cause. But it's the White House itself that's seen as the best defense against the big, bad wolf -- or bear -- roaming outside Georgia's house.
The White House does issue statements in support of Georgia's territorial integrity. Yet, to many Georgians, this is akin to commenting on a friend’s Facebook photo instead of meeting him for drinks.
If you think that Baku has only fossil fuel to offer for export, Azerbaijan’s defense ministry has got some news for you. The country plans a foray into the international gun market. There are foreign companies that “want” Azerbaijani pistols and they will get them, Defense Industry Minister Yaver Jomalov pledged on May 19. In particular, the Azerbaijani-made Inam, Zefer and Zefer-K pistols are attracting shoppers' fancy, he claimed. Defense officials hope that military output will soon account for a large part of the country’s non-oil export revenues.
Regional media speculated that Erdogan arrived in Azerbaijan on a mission to coax Aliyev into concessions on natural gas and Karabakh. Neither has occurred. The gas deal got postponed, while Turkey and Azerbaijan played the same broken Karabakh record: Armenia must give up some of the land it occupies before the Turkish-Armenia border can open.
The Turkey-Azerbaijan-Armenia discussions are increasingly reminiscent of the haggling over chairs between adventurist Ostap Bender and theater hand Mechnikov from the iconic Soviet satire "The 12 Chairs:"
Mechnikov: “The money in the morning, the chairs in the evening or the money in the evening, and the chairs next morning.”
Bender: “How about chairs today, money tomorrow?”
Mechnikov: “. . .My soul refuses to accept such terms.”
Throughout the brouhaha over the book Saidumlo Siroba or Holy Crap, the Georgian Orthodox Church has kept silent. But now the Church has spoken. In a written statement on May 15, the Patriarchy called for adopting a law that would help shut fiction writers' blasphemous mouths. The Patriarchy charged that Holy Crap, which has set off everything from heated debates to televised fistfights, is part of an ongoing war against the Church and traditional Georgian values. The Church distanced itself from the violence, but said that the new law should censor any written exercise in “indecency, licentiousness and Satanism.”
Azerbaijan’s President Ilham Aliyev is not easily swayed, but looks like the threat of an Islamic fatwa can do wonders these days. A demolition ball ready to smash Baku’s Fatimeyi-Zahra mosque froze in the air afterIran’s Grand Ayatollah Makarem Shirazi threatened to unleash the wrath of radical believers against Azerbaijani officials if the building was destroyed.
Aliyev is no Salman Rushdie, and you cannot really run a country from a secret location in London.
The missive proved more effective than numerous pleadings from local religious communities to spare the mosque, which an Azerbaijan court ruled was built illegally.
The mosque has been handed over to the Azerbaijan-based Muslim Spiritual Board of the Caucasus, but Aliyev’s secular government now has even more reasons to watch out for the turbaned theocracy to the south.
