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So I Pardoned an Axe Murder: The Geopolitics of Setting a Killer Fre

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  • So I Pardoned an Axe Murder: The Geopolitics of Setting a Killer Fre

    The Atlantic
    Sept 9 2012


    So I Pardoned an Axe Murder: The Geopolitics of Setting a Killer Free

    Armin Rosen - Atlantic Media fellow.

    The most vicious slow-boil conflict you've never heard of yields the
    most bizarre axe-related diplomatic incident in years.

    In 2004, a military officer from the majority Shiite nation of
    Azerbaijan named Ramil Safarov hacked an Armenian counterpart to death
    with an axe while both were attending a NATO language-training course
    in Hungary. Murdering a guest of NATO and an officer from a foreign
    government will probably not go down as a great moment in diplomatic
    probity. And yet, Hungary last week extradited Safarov back to
    Azerbaijan, where the president pardoned him for his act of senseless
    and apparently unwarranted violence. The bizarre and bloody incident
    is a reminder of the tense relationship, which can itself be both
    bizarre and bloody at times, between these two former Soviet
    republics.

    There are a few things to understand about this complicated corner of
    the world that might help inform the axe attack and its aftermath.
    First, Armenia and Azerbaijan have been in some state of conflict
    since declaring independence from the Soviet Union. The war that broke
    out in 1988 officially ended six years later. But, with some of the
    most contested issues left unresolved, occasional cross-border
    violence has continued, including several times in just 2011. Second,
    perhaps the most important of those unresolved issues is the status of
    the Ngarno-Karbakh region of Azerbaijan, an Armenian-occupied
    "independent republic" that has been almost completely cleansed of its
    Azeri population. Safarov's family just happens to be from
    Ngaron-Karbakh. And, third, Armenian-Azeri tension over the disputed
    region seems to be getting worse.

    On August 31, Hungary extradited Safarov, who was serving a life
    sentence for the Armenian officer's murder, to Azerbaijan, where Azeri
    president Ilham Aliyev immediately pardoned him. It's impossible to
    know for sure why Hungary would do this, although it's worth noting
    that Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban has taken plenty of Western
    criticism for his government's apparently backsliding democracy.
    Orban's political party has pushed a series of allegedly
    anti-democratic measures through Hungary's parliament and rules with
    an increasingly autocratic and nationalistic style. As Budapest-based
    Professor Peter Marton explained in a post at Registan.net, Orban has
    started looking away from Europe and toward autocratic states for
    economic opportunity and political support. One of his new friends
    just happens to be Azerbaijan.

    [Orban's government] also announced a policy of "global opening" and
    later a policy of "eastern opening," turning, for favorable economic
    cooperation agreements and assistance, to countries like China, Saudi
    Arabia, and even Azerbaijan. In the beginning of August this year,
    news emerged that Hungary was considering an issuance of sovereign
    bonds in Turkey, denominated in either Turkish lira or Azeri manat, or
    both. At around the same time, the Azeri oil firm, SOCAR indicated
    they would eventually decide on whether they would prefer the
    Nabucco-West or the TAP (Trans-Adriatic) pipeline as the priority arm
    of the gas supply route carrying gas from the Caspian Shah Deniz field
    to Europe.

    As Marton explains, Azerbaijan has spent the last eight years
    pressuring the Hungarian government to release Safarov back home, and
    it seems Orban has finally capitulated. That could risk further
    isolating Hungary within Europe, even if it raises the potential for
    Hungarian-Azeri cooperation. Armenia has already cut off diplomatic
    relations with Hungary over the incident, and the decision has sparked
    protests within Hungary itself, though the Hungarian government claims
    that Azerbaijan promised not to pardon Safarov.

    The Ngarno-Karbakh conflict doesn't get a lot of press in the United
    States (you can find one of the few English-language books on the
    subject here). But it is still a potential powder keg, already the
    cause of a small-scale regional arms race and a significant impediment
    to normalizing relations between Armenia and its other big neighbor,
    Turkey. With the peace process stalled, George Mason University
    professor Phil Gemaghelyan recently offered this bleak assessment of
    where the conflict, which has already killed up to 30,000 people and
    displaced over a million more, seems to be heading:

    Contemporary ethnic conflicts are rarely resolved through high-level
    negotiations alone. Yet, for almost 20 years now the so-called
    Nagorno-Karabakh peace process has been limited to just that -
    official negotiations -- with all the other dynamics in the region
    bringing the sides closer to war than to peace. The sides are engaged
    in an ever-escalating arm race; the education and media in Armenia,
    Azerbaijan and Nagorno-Karabakh are functioning as well-oiled
    propaganda machines dehumanizing the other, portraying the conflict as
    primordial, existential and insolvable, and raising generations of
    youth ready to kill. The speeches of politicians serve the same
    purpose. The two most outrageous yet typical cases include the widely
    referenced by Azerbaijani media quote of the former Armenian president
    Kocharyan about "ethnic incompatibility between Armenians and
    Azerbaijanis;" meanwhile the Armenian media quotes the current
    Azerbaijani president Aliyev as referring to the "Armenians of the
    world" as enemies of Azerbaijan. Any political debate within either
    society about the conflict and compromises necessary to resolve the
    conflict are non-existent and voicing anything but a maximalist
    position is a taboo.

    The Safarov pardon won't help calm the region's tensions. The head of
    NATO has already expressed concern over the decision. But, within
    Azerbaijan, Safarov has been feted as a national hero, and the
    executive secretary of the country's ruling party has even ominously
    linked the officer's release with eventual victory over Armenia.
    "Ramil is released, next is the liberation of Karabakh," he said.

    Azerbaijan's pardon, which comes in the context of an already
    nerve-racking geopolitical dynamic, is nationalist politics at its
    best, defiance epitomized.

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