Last week, The New York Times' travel section offered a tip to other explorers about how to visit Karabakh and still be able to hop over to Azerbaijani-controlled territory later -- namely, just “ask for the visa to be put on a separate piece of paper that can be removed from your passport.”
The trick is hardly a secret. And one that prudent visitors quickly learn, with or without a how-to in the American "newspaper of record."
Safarov, who was sentenced to life imprisonment in Hungary for the 2004 beheading of Armenian army Lieutenant Gurgen Margaryan at a NATO training program in Budapest, was extradited to and freed in Azerbaijan last month, causing shock and anger in Armenia.
Photos depicting Yerevan city buses bearing posters announcing an “Open Season for Safarov Hunting” are making the rounds online. The posters reportedly appear in various places throughout the city.
Yerevan certainly has upped the war rhetoric against Baku since Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev's August 31 pardon of Safarov, but no official has called publicly for taking Safarov out in a Mossad-style operation. It is unclear who is behind the “hunting” campaign, but any potential attempt to assassinate Safarov could, arguably, push the situation over the edge. (International expressions of concern, to date,appear to have had little visible effect.)
Some Armenian commentators say that the poster campaign is just a way for many citizens to vent their anger about the pardon, but, given the relentless propaganda campaigns on both sides, there can always be someone who opts to take the calls to exterminate the enemy literally. Safarov is walking proof of that.
NATO boss Anders fogh Rasmussen has slapped Baku on the wrist for pardoning the murderer of an Armenian army officer (and glorifying him, to boot), but the gesture appears to have left Yerevan unimpressed.
In this tough-spoken part of the world, “deep concern” is widely seen as a Western diplomatic term for “This was bad, but we are not going to do anything about it.” And subsequent tweets expressing NATO's appreciation of Azerbaijan's role in the Afghanistan campaign and of Baku's partnership with the Alliance would particularly not correct that impression.
Many Armenians believe that the Alliance bears some responsibility for the 2004 axe murder since it happened at a NATO seminar in Budapest. Rasmussen does not.
Arguably, at a time like this, whatever he said on his Armenia-Azerbaijan tour, the general secretary would be left having to balance on an extremely high wire. But the question is to what extent his presence gave both sides pause amidst their rush of rage or simply directed their anger at another target -- the international community itself.
To Armenia, Azerbaijan's recent pardoning of Lieutenant Ramil Safarov, convicted of the 2004 axe murder of an Armenian army officer during a training in Budapest, was a slap in the face. Now, Armenia is contemplating a response that could take the two countries' angry dispute over Safarov into an entirely new dimension.
A bill was presented to the Armenian parliament on September 4 to recognize as an independent country the breakaway region of Nagorno Karabakh, the territory that was the cause of the 1988-1994 war between Armenia and Azerbaijan. No date has yet been scheduled for the vote.
Arguably, Armenia has long interacted with the de-facto government of Karabakh as if with an independent country -- if not an additional Armenian province -- but has refrained from making that position official.
Coming on the heels of warnings of war from Armenian President Serzh Sargsyan, a Karabakh native, the measure might well give outside observers pause.
The bill, though, is far from the enraged response of an isolated few. Armenia has severed diplomatic relations with Hungary, where Safarov had been serving life for the 2004 murder, for permitting Safarov's return to Azerbaijan, with demonstrations staged in Budapest and Yerevan, to boot.
Photojournalist Anahit Hayrapetyan covered the recent election for the de-facto president of Nagorno Karabakh. Anahit, who is originally from the breakaway region in the South Caucasus, traveled to several villages and the capital Stepanakert to catch up on how the region is faring during the unresolved conflict with Azerbaijan.
Anahit Hayrapetyan is a freelance photojournalist based in Yerevan.
Armenia may be a bitter enemy and all for Azerbaijan, but the reaction to this murder, an act worthy of the Hostel horror film series, shows just how deeply seeded the raging propaganda against Armenia (and, in turn, Armenia's angry denunciations of Azerbaijan) has become in the minds of many. The gruesome crimes committed by Armenians against Azerbaijanis during the Nagorno-Karabakh war are cited as a justification of sorts for both Safarov’s acts and his release.
The American concept of states’ rights is acting like yet another fly in the ointment of the Nagorno-Karabakh peace process.
While many people in the coastal state of Massachusetts have been transfixed by a Great White shark attack on a man in the waters off Cape Cod, state legislators approved on August 6 a resolution calling for the federal government in Washington to push for recognition of Karabakh’s independence.
One particularly controversial passage of the resolution says that Karabakh, a territory with a predominantly ethnic Armenian population, was “arbitrarily severed from Armenia and forced under Soviet Azerbaijani administration.”
The measure induced howls of disapproval in Azerbaijan, which has been struggling to regain the territory ever since it lost a 1988-1994 conflict to Armenian forces. Azerbaijani diplomats accused Massachusetts lawmakers of pandering to Armenian-American lobbying groups and to the state’s significant Armenian community. A Foreign Ministry statement
stressed that the state lawmakers’ “position did not reflect that of the US government.”
As reported earlier by EurasiaNet.org, the arrival in Armenia of Armenian-Syrian refugees is creating some friction. Now, some politicians from both Armenia proper and Nagorno-Karabakh are floating a controversial remedy; encouraging those fleeing the Syrian violence to settle in the breakaway republic.
Since the 1988-1994 conflict that resulted in the expulsion of the territory’s Azeris, Nagorno-Karabakh has experienced a steady decline of its Armenian population. To halt the demographic trend, the region has hosted a mass wedding, and, recently, authorities mulled offering convicts a fresh start there.
The idea of Armenian-Syrians resettling in Karabakh has irked the Azerbaijani government, which still is struggling to regain the territory. Officials in Baku have asked international negotiators mediating the Karabakh conflict to exert influence on Yerevan to abandon the idea.
Meanwhile, a large American organization, the Armenian General Benevolent Union, announced that it had set aside $1 million as an emergency fund for Syrian-Armenians – for both those who seek to flee the violence and those who choose to remain in Syria.
Residents in the Caucasus breakaway region of Nagorno Karabakh voted in elections for the de-facto president on July 20.
EurasiaNet.org contributing photojournalist Anahit Hayrapetyan, who lives in Yerevan, is originally from a village in Nagorno Karabakh. She returned to her native region to document the de-facto presidential election. This is a collection of Polaroid portraits taken of Nagorno Karabakh residents before and on election day.
The July 20 de-facto presidential election in breakaway Nagorno Karabakh has turned out even more uneventful than anticipated. According to an early vote tally, incumbent Bako Saakian is poised to prevail with some 66.7 percent of the vote.
Saakian's main rival, Vitaly Balasanian, a Karabakh war hero and onetime de-facto deputy defense minister, finished with nearly a third of the vote.
Azerbaijan, which lays claim to the territory, has denounced the elections as illegitimate for the hundreds of thousands of ethnic Azeris driven from the territory.
A blurry spot on most world maps, Karabakh does not get to participate in the internationally mediated talks over its future, and world powers do not recognize the legitimacy of its elections.
