Field Reports

Baku has raised a formal protest with France and Germany over events related to the Nagorno-Karabakh region, which is internationally recognized as Azerbaijani territory, but de facto controlled by Armenian troops. Four members of the French National Assembly headed by Guy Teissier, Chairman of the French Assembly's defense and armed forces committee, arrived in the breakaway region on August 22 and met with Bako Sahakian, the president of the unrecognized Nagorno-Karabakh Republic.
Speaking in the de facto parliament of Nagorno-Karabakh, Teissier, who is a member of France's ruling Union for a Popular Movement (UMP), described the trip as a gesture of “solidarity.” The recent visit of French deputies shows that France pursues a policy based on double standards though this country together with Russia and the U.S. are mediating to find a solution to the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict, said Malahat Ibrahimqizi, a member of the Azerbaijani Parliament from the ruling New Azerbaijan Party. “If they had good intentions in Karabakh, they would have requested permission from relevant authorities in Azerbaijan. Otherwise, I condemn their visit,” she stated.
The Azerbaijani Foreign Ministry has sent two letters of protest to the French Foreign Ministry and the National Assembly over the visit of four deputies to the breakaway region. Elman Abdullayev, spokesman of the Azerbaijani Foreign Ministry, said that the four deputies had been blacklisted and declared persona non grata in Azerbaijan. “They had to inform Azerbaijani authorities in advance about the visit. Otherwise, it is considered as disrespect for the country's sovereignty and territorial integrity, which is a violation of the law. It is illegal visit to Azerbaijan’s territory because Nagorno-Karabakh is internationally recognized part of Azerbaijan,” Abdullayev said. Abdullayev had trouble confirming how many persons had been put on the so-called black list so far, but noted that journalists and businessmen were represented apart from deputies and state figures. “All of them will be refused visas to Azerbaijan,” he stated. “The Government of Azerbaijan has the right to take measures against people who violate its territorial integrity. They have to know that the de facto authorities of Nagorno-Karabakh are illegitimate.”

On August 25, Kazakhstan’s President Nursultan Nazarbayev welcomed an official South Korean delegation to Astana, headed by the President of the Republic of Korea, Lee Myun-bak. This was their fifth meeting in three years, and a result of a number of bilateral contacts at the level of officials and businesspeople. When speaking to the press at the end of talks behind closed doors, the presidents announced the effective signing of 12 agreements that are intended to strengthen cooperation between the two countries in the light of an already existing strategic partnership concluded in May 2009.

Moscow’s efforts to undermine the North Caucasian insurgency by investing in the region continue to encounter difficulties. On July 25, the Ministry for Regional Development proposed a new federal program aimed at promoting socio-economic development in Russia’s North Caucasus Federal District. The program is scheduled to run from 2012 through 2025 and would require a significant increase in Moscow’s spending on the region. The total cost of the project amounts to more than US$ 140 billion. Almost US$ 90 billion of the funding would be taken from the federal budget. An additional US$ 7 billion would come from the heavily subsidized budgets of the local republics and around US$ 38 billion would be provided by extra-budgetary funds. Soon after the program was proposed, officials from the Finance Ministry and the Ministry for Economic Development expressed concerns about their ability to afford these new budgetary allocations. Moreover, on August 3, Deputy Finance Minister Tatiana Nesterenko announced that the Finance Ministry would not approve the new development program.

In early July 2011, the Speaker of Russia’s State Duma, Boris Gryzlov, made a statement to the Russian media concerning unresolved issues in military cooperation between Russia and Tajikistan. Gryzlov criticized Tajikistan’s alleged inability to protect its own border with Afghanistan and to stop drug trafficking from Afghanistan to Russia. The statement provoked vigorous discussions between experts and politicians from both sides.

Built in 1985, the Gabala radar station was an element of the Soviet anti-missile defence system. Located in a mountainous area in northern Azerbaijan, it is designed for ballistic missile early warning, including tracking, coordinate measuring and computation of trajectory parameters. Its range capability on targets is 6,000 kilometers, which allows monitoring of Iranian, Turkish, Indian, Iraqi, Pakistani, and partly Chinese airspace, along with several Asian and African countries.

After more than a year after the interethnic clashes between Uzbeks and Kyrgyz in the southern regions of Kyrgyzstan, the situation is far from resolved. Local observers report that the situation on the state border and in the Sokh enclave of Uzbekistan is deteriorating. Moreover, the Committee on protection of the state border of Uzbekistan reports that “certain representatives” of the Batken region authorities in Kyrgyzstan seek “to aggravate the situation artificially.”

Ahead of Tajikistan’s 20th independence anniversary on 9 September, President Emomali Rahmon sent a draft law to the country’s parliament on July 27, which would grant full amnesty or reduced terms for nearly 15,000 individuals serving prison sentences and awaiting legal proceedings in pre-trial detention. Over 8,500 may be released from jail under the proposed amnesty, which will extend to all female inmates, minors, convicts over the age of 55, disabled inmates, foreign nationals, veterans of the Soviet campaign in Afghanistan, military deserters, and those suffering from cancer, tuberculosis or other serious illnesses. Prisoners eligible for release will also include those sentenced for crimes of negligence, other offences punishable by jail terms not exceeding five years, and economic crimes if the convicts have fully repaid the financial losses they caused.

The latest statement by President Nazarbayev’s political advisor Ermukhamet Ertysbayev has literally turned the community of political commentators upside down. In his July 25 interview for the reputable Russian newspaper Kommersant, Ertysbayev said that if Kazakhstan’s President was to prematurely relinquish his responsibilities, his son-in-law Timur Kulibayev would be most likely to succeed him. This statement follows a recent publication in the German tabloid Bild, which reported about Nazarbayev’s hospitalization in one of Hamburg’s most prominent clinics. According to the German press, Nazarbayev might have been diagnosed with cancer and has visited the University Medical Center Hamburg-Eppendorf to receive expensive treatment. This information, though strongly denied by the Kazakh Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Kazakhstan’s Embassy in Berlin, is now subject to lively discussions about the future of the current president and his political heritage.

U.S. intelligence agencies confirmed Russian ties to the explosion near the U.S. Embassy in Tbilisi last year, the Washington Times reported on July 27th. Russia termed the publication an attempt to stir a new “propaganda hype”.

On July 25, the newly-formed Council for the Selection of Judges started interviewing the candidates to the vacant positions of judges of the Supreme Court and the Constitutional Chamber. Almost 130 applicants are competing for 35 vacant posts in the Supreme Court and 11 in the Constitutional Chamber. The names of the selected candidates will be finalized by August 5 and sent to the President, who will in her turn submit the list of candidates to the parliament for approval.