Armenia to attend NATO seminar as Baku pledges to guarantee safety

June 15, 2014 By administrator

June 14, 2014 – 17:57 AMT

PanARMENIAN.Net – The head of the Armenian delegation to NATO PA Koryun Nahapetyan and delegation member, Heritage parliamentary faction secretary Tevan Poghosyan will leave for Azerbaijan on June 15 to participate in NATO PA’s Rose Roth seminar in Baku June 16-18.

As Tevan Poghosyan told Panorama.am, Baku pledged to guarantee the Armenian participants’ security at the seminar.

As Koryun Nahapetyan told Panorama.am earlier, the seminar agenda includes numerous issues of interest to Armenia, in particular the Nagorno Karabakh conflict settlement.

Azerbaijan Pipelineistan & the Gülen-SOCAR Network Exposed

June 11, 2014 By administrator

By Christoph Germann

As Ozkan notes, one of the biggest obstacles to the Trans-Caspian pipeline is Russia’s strong opposition. Furthermore, up to this point, the European Union has failed to come up with a unified energy policy and it does not look like as if this will change anytime soon. Relations between Turkey and Russia are fairly complex and resilient but if the Turkish government continues to push ahead with the Trans-Caspian project, Ankara’s ties with Moscow could be damaged beyond repair. In recent weeks, Turkey was remarkably silent about the crisis in Ukraine, much to the dismay of its NATO allies.

According to the Kremlin, Turkish PM Erdogan even praised “the decisions made by the Russian president to improve the situation of Crimean Tatars.” With Turkish-Russian relations apparently unaffected by the Ukraine crisis, Kazakh President Nursultan Nazarbayev used the Turkic Council summit to make the case for closer cooperation between the Turkic countries and the Moscow-led Eurasian Economic Union (EEU) and he invited Turkey to join the newly formed trade bloc. Although the Erdogan government will hardly take the offer, there seems to be a rapprochement between Ankara and Moscow. Dr. Vitaly Naumkin explained recently the reason for this:

Russia, Turkey agree on Gulen

Paradoxically, what today promotes the rapprochement between Russia and Turkey is Moscow’s extremely negative attitude toward the activities and ideas of Fethullah Gulen. In the past, when Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan and his Justice and Development Party (AKP) were allied with the leader of this Islamic sect — which is taking root in many countries around the world and in which a significant portion of Turkey’s population is involved, including prominent officials and, in particular, members of the security structures and the judges — Moscow’s position acted as an irritant for Ankara. Now, however, with the Cold War flaring up between the leader of the AKP and Gulen, who resides in the United States, Moscow’s position creates an interest in joint actions to limit his influence. Recall that all Gulenist schools have been closed in Russia, and in 2012 numerous books by this ideologue were included in the federal list of extremist literature by a Russian court decision

…

Russia was one of the first countries to ban the CIA-backed Gülen movement and, in contrast to other governments, the Kremlin will not rethink this decision. Experts such as Vasily Ivanov, an associate at the influential Russian Institute for Strategic Studies, warn against the nefarious cult. In his paper “Fethullah Gulen’s Movement: an extremist organization masquerading as supporters of ‘the dialogue of civilizations’” Ivanov argues that the Gülen movement “glamorizes the idea of armed jihad.” A few weeks ago, more and more people in Azerbaijan came to the same conclusion. The crackdown of the Aliyev regime on the Gülen movement was somewhat surprising considering Baku’s subservience to Washington and some things did not add up, as mentioned in a previous round-up:

“A published list of alleged Azerbaijani Gülenists also included Defense Minister Zakir Hasanov and, ironically, SOCAR’s vice-president Khalik Mammadov, which has prompted some speculation whether Baku is really cracking down on Hizmet by placing its schools under SOCAR’s control or if the Gülenists are in league with the state-owned oil and natural gas corporation.”

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This week, a new article exposing the extensive lobbying efforts of the Azerbaijani authorities in the United States shed more light on the relationship between the Sate Oil Company of Azerbaijan Republic (SOCAR) and the movement of CIA puppet Fethullah Gülen. According to the report, since early 2013, American lawmakers in 17 states have introduced resolutions or memorials relating to Azerbaijan, all of which had one thing in common:

Inside Azerbaijan’s Bizarre U.S. Lobbying Push

What the initiatives had in common was they nearly all had at least one sponsor who attended a conference in the capital Baku in May 2013 organized by the Turquoise Council for Americans and Eurasians. The council is a Houston-based group connected to Fethullah Gulen, the leader of the moderate Islamist Hizmet movement who fled Turkey in 1999 after clashing with secular Turkish authorities who accused him of trying to turn Turkey into a religious Islamist state.

The Turquoise Council, headed by a Gulenist follower named Kemal Oksuz, paid for the travel of lawmakers who went on the trip, according to congressional records. Oksuz also chairs the Assembly for the Friends of Azerbaijan (AFAZ), a Houston group sponsored by SOCAR, which hosted a U.S.-Azerbaijan convention in Washington at the end of April attended by many of the same lawmakers who went on the trip to Baku, as well as other members of Congress and former administration officials. The Assembly’s vice president is Milla Perry Jones, the sister of Texas Gov. Rick Perry, and its treasurer is Rauf Mammadov, the chief of SOCAR’s U.S. branch. Oksuz also owned TDM Contracting, a construction firm in Texas that worked to build a network of Gulenist charter schools there.

…

So the Gülen movement and SOCAR are definitely working hand in hand, which means that Azerbaijan’s move to place the Gülen schools under SOCAR’s control did not really amount to a crackdown. Besides the Gülen-SOCAR network, the Aliyev regime is also using the Azerbaijan America Alliance as a conduit to lobby in the United States. The fairly new group is run by Anar Mammadov, the son of Azerbaijan’s Transport Minister Ziya Mammadov, and Dan Burton, former U.S. Congressman from Indiana. Burton demonstrated his abilities as a lobbyist already during his time in Congress. He did not shy away from taking bribes from the government of Turkey or Pakistan’s ISI and has earned himself a place in Sibel Edmonds’ State Secrets Privilege Gallery. Having friends like Burton in its pocket enables the Azerbaijani government to influence resolutions on Nagorno-Karabakh and the like but it will not solve Baku’s latest problem. A few days after French energy giant Total decided to sell its stake in Azerbaijan’s Shah Deniz II gas project to Turkey’s state oil company TPAO, both Total and E.ON announced their plans to withdraw from the Trans Adriatic Pipeline (TAP):

Armenia warns Azerbaijan after deadly échaufourrées

June 9, 2014 By administrator

Armenia Azerbaijan has threatened “serious consequences” after two of its soldiers were killed on its border with the Azerbaijani exclave of Nakhichevan.

According to the Armenian army, Andranik Yeghoyan, 26, and Boris Gasparian, 22, were killed Thursday by a sniper in the army of Azerbaijan located about 70 km southeast of Yerevan.

“For several days, the enemy has created tension by misinformation and various political provocations on the border of Nakhichevan”, said Friday Artsrun Hovannisian, the spokesman of the Ministry of Defence. “We lost two soldiers in the wake of yesterday’s shooting. The enemy was then mastered. “

There was no official reaction to the time of the Azerbaijani side.

Violations of the cease-fire on the border between Armenia and Nakhichevan were very rare, unlike other sections of the Armenian-Azerbaijani border long and “line of contact” around Nagorno-Karabakh. Yet there armed incidents appear to have increased somewhat since last year. Azerbaijani soldier serving in Nakhchivan was killed Monday.

The fatal shooting that killed two Armenian military prompted the Defense Minister Seyran Ohanian hold an emergency meeting in Yerevan with Andrzej Kasprzyk, the Head of the OSCE after the ceasefire regime fire in the zone of the Karabakh conflict.

According Hovannisian, Ohanian asked Kasprzyk help ease tensions on the front lines. The Minister warned that “the situation has serious consequences for Azerbaijan,” said Hovannisian.

The incidents led Armenia to accuse Baku of torpedoing the latest international efforts in Karabakh peace process. Deputy Minister of Foreign Affairs Shavarsh Kocharian said Ilham Aliyev specifically tried to scuttle a new meeting with his Armenian counterpart Serzh Sargsyan, wanted by U.S. mediators, Russian and French meeting.

“The mediators intend to try to end this impasse,” said Kocharian. “This is in contrast with the actions of Azerbaijan. “” They do everything to prevent a step in the negotiation process, “he has said.

Monday, June 9, 2014,
Claire © armenews.com

Armenia MPs want to attend NATO seminar in Azerbaijan

June 9, 2014 By administrator

June 09, 2014 | 12:46

YEREVAN. – The Armenian National Assembly (NA) deputies have expressed a wish to head for the Azerbaijani capital city Baku, to participate in the 2014 Rose-Roth Seminar of the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO).

Koryun Nahapetyan, who heads the NA delegation to the NATO Parliamentary Assembly, told the aforesaid to reporters on Monday.

In his words, if security guarantees are given, the Armenian delegation stands ready to travel to Baku to attend the event.

“We have offered to hold the 2015 seminar in [Armenia’s capital city] Yerevan,” Nahapetyan added.

The NATO 2014 Rose-Roth Seminar will be convened this month. The Rose-Roth Seminars are held since 1990, and they aim to strengthen NATO partnership with the Central and Eastern European countries.

According to “Commandos” Armenia must give an appropriate response to Azerbaijani aggression

June 7, 2014 By administrator

After the death on June 5 of two soldiers Armenians Armenian-Azeri border on the border line between Armenia and Nakhichevan, the reactions are many in Armenia and Diaspora. According to General Arkady Ter-Tadevosyan called “Commandos”, the hero of the war of liberation of Artsakh (Nagorno-Karabakh), Armenia must give a strong and appropriate response to Azerbaijan. “This is the first Once they fired from that direction. If we do not give a strong response, Azeri continue their shots (…) our military response will be the only answer to give, “he said. “Commandos” is convinced that the enemy is not ready for war, and that the Azerbaijani people do not want war. But Baku conducts ad effects. “Everybody know that we have a better trained army, which means that the Azeri provocations will not affect us,” says Arkady Ter-Tadevosyan.

Saturday, June 7, 2014,
Krikor Amirzayan © armenews.com

Inside Azerbaijan’s Bizarre U.S. Lobbying Push

June 4, 2014 By administrator

Why has Baku teamed up with the Gulenist movement to win the hearts and minds of small-time US lawmakers?

posted on June 2, 2014, at 8:19 p.m.

By Rosie Gray BuzzFeed Staff

Azerbaijan’s President Ilham Aliyev speaks during a session at the annual meeting of the World Economic Forum (WEF) in Davos in January. Ruben Sprich / Reuters

WASHINGTON — Azerbaijan has launched an unusual campaign to win influence among U.S. lawmakers, teaming up with a Turkish guru in exile and the sister of Texas Gov. Rick Perry, as it seeks to translate its immense oil wealth into political support.

Since early 2013, state legislators in 17 states have introduced resolutions or memorials relating to the former Soviet Republic. Most are general statements of support or recognition of the 1992 Khojaly massacre, one of the most violent and controversial incidents in Azerbaijan’s war with neighboring Armenia.

What the initiatives had in common was they nearly all had at least one sponsor who attended a conference in the capital Baku in May 2013 organized by the Turquoise Council for Americans and Eurasians. The council is a Houston-based group connected to Fethullah Gulen, the leader of the moderate Islamist Hizmet movement who fled Turkey in 1999 after clashing with secular Turkish authorities who accused him of trying to turn Turkey into a religious Islamist state.

The initiatives — brought in Utah, New Mexico, Tennessee, Kansas, South Dakota, Missouri, Arkansas, Indiana, Oklahoma, Texas, Arizona, Pennsylvania, Mississippi, Illinois, West Virginia, Wyoming, and Hawaii — play well domestically in Azerbaijan, a country run by a regime accused of corruption and widespread human rights abuses, even if not all of them were passed.

The president of Azerbaijan, Ilham Aliyev, has so far mostly avoided the international scrutiny and criticism afforded to similar human rights abusers. This month, the country assumed the chairmanship of the committee of ministers of the Council of Europe, Europe’s leading human rights body, amid a renewed crackdown on opposition activists. Last month alone it sentenced eight youth activists to six to eight years in prison and is currently trying five people who criticized the government on Facebook, according to Human Rights Watch.

In an effort to improve this image, Azerbaijan has become one of the top 10 foreign spenders on lobbying in the United States, spending $2.3 million last year, according to the Sunlight Foundation.

Azerbaijan lobbies in the U.S. through three main conduits: its embassy; a fairly new group called the Azerbaijan America Alliance; and its state oil company SOCAR, which has opened an office in Washington.

The Azerbaijan America Alliance, which helped finance a Flight 93 memorial in Pennsylvania in 2013, is run by Anar Mammadov, the son of Azerbaijan’s Transport Minister Ziya Mammadov. He is perhaps best known for once allegedly paying a restaurant in the Gabala region of Azerbaijan $1 million to slaughter and grill a bear for him.

Experts say these organizations are often the work of the offspring of the Azeri elite. “There is a phenomenon of the children of oligarchs acting as lobbyists abroad,” said Tom de Waal, a South Caucasus expert at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.

“They have these very posh gala dinners,” said one Azerbaijan expert who spoke on the condition of anonymity. The Alliance is “one way that [Mammadov] is making his family more important to the regime.”

Then there is SOCAR, which has hired the Washington firm Roberti + White and is listed as a partner in the Houston groups that have done much of the outreach to state legislators. The May trip to Baku, which also included members of Congress and former Obama administration officials, appears to have been key. A report by the only U.S. journalist to attend the trip (whose visit was also paid for) said lawmakers “jostled for pictures” in Azerbaijan’s parliament, which is overwhelmingly dominated by Azerbaijan’s ruling party, went sightseeing in Baku, “showered their hosts with praise” at a visit to a university, and were interviewed relentlessly by Azerbaijani TV reporters. The trip’s attendees reportedly each received a “hand-woven Azeri carpet, an executive briefcase and a set of Czech-made tea glasses.” Several of them spoke at the conference that culminated the trip, as did David Plouffe and Robert Gibbs, former top Obama administration officials, and Jim Messina, President Obama’s 2012 campaign manager.

Sometimes the link between the Azeris and the resolutions was even more direct. In Tennessee, Representative Joe Towns, who was invited to attend the 2013 trips, introduced an Azerbaijan-related bill this year. Local media noticed that he had received $10,000 in campaign donations from a a handful of people in Houston, Texas who are members of the Azeri and Turkish communities there. Towns denied that the contributions had inspired him to write the resolution.

The Turquoise Council, headed by a Gulenist follower named Kemal Oksuz, paid for the travel of lawmakers who went on the trip, according to congressional records. Oksuz also chairs the Assembly for the Friends of Azerbaijan (AFAZ), a Houston group sponsored by SOCAR, which hosted a U.S.-Azerbaijan convention in Washington at the end of April attended by many of the same lawmakers who went on the trip to Baku, as well as other members of Congress and former administration officials. The Assembly’s vice president is Milla Perry Jones, the sister of Texas Gov. Rick Perry, and its treasurer is Rauf Mammadov, the chief of SOCAR’s U.S. branch. Oksuz also owned TDM Contracting, a construction firm in Texas that worked to build a network of Gulenist charter schools there. (Reached by phone, Jones said her position with AFAZ was “ceremonial” and unpaid and that she had become involved with the group after traveling to Azerbaijan. Jones said she had “no idea” who is a member of the organization.)

Oksuz has has donated directly to several of the members involved in the trip as well as other politicians and party committees. Oksuz denied there was any anything improper in his relationship with Towns or any other lawmaker. He told BuzzFeed that the Turquoise Council organizes trips to Turkey, Azerbaijan, and Kazakhstan to provide an opportunity to “meet there with the government officials, civic society leaders, U.S. Embassy staff, and people from public” and “get briefing about the relations. So that they learn more about the country and its relations with the U.S.”

Nevertheless, the Baku trip raised eyebrows in some places. In Hawaii, local media questioned why two state legislators introduced a pro-Azerbaijan resolution after going on the trip, and in Washington state, concerns were raised about ethics violations.

Most of the lawmakers contacted for this article either declined to comment or did not return a request for comment.

New Mexico State Sen. Jerry Ortiz y Pino told BuzzFeed that he introduced a Khojaly memorial at the request of the Turkish community and the “honorary Azeri consul” in Albuquerque. He said he and a delegation of New Mexico legislators had visited Azerbaijan in 2012.

“Many New Mexico legislators (me among them) have traveled in the past five years to Turkey for meetings with Turkish legislators and to Azerbaijan for meetings with Azeri officials and legislators,” Ortiz y Pino said. “We have also hosted a delegation of Turkish elected officials during their visit to the U.S. a couple of years ago. The Azeri government is keen to repair its image in the U.S. press and has undertaken a strong initiative among state legislators to impress us with how supportive they are of the U.S. government and its people.”

Azerbaijan, a secular majority Muslim country, has sought to lean westward since the fall of the Soviet Union, developing a burgeoning defense partnership with Israel and adopting a wary stance toward Iran. The U.S. has bilateral ties with Azerbaijan and supported the Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan pipeline as an alternative to Russian and Iranian energy; a statement by Secretary of State John Kerry on Azerbaijan’s National Day noted the two countries’ “commitment to diversifying energy supplies and promoting regional security.”

Ortiz y Pino acknowledged that many were confused about his initiative. “To be honest, our memorial was met with mostly blank stares by most legislators who haven’s [sic] visited Azerbaijan. The issue didn’t generate a great deal of comment or questions and passed unanimously, I believe.”

Wyoming state Rep. Dave Zwonitzer said he and four other Wyoming lawmakers were contacted in 2013 by the Gulenist group the Mosaic Foundation, which offered the free trip to Baku. On the trip, he said, were “four buses full of legislators” from around the country. Zwonitzer said that though he personally was not directly encouraged to introduce a resolution, “I did get the impression from other legislators I talked to that they had been encouraged.” He said that it was “never clear to us” who exactly was paying for the trip, “which was a little disconcerting.”

Zwonitzer and his colleagues introduced their resolution based on model legislation provided to them by the Mosaic Foundation, though they changed one sentence, he said. It failed to pass, but they plan to reintroduce something similar in the 2015 legislative session.

“You don’t get a free 10-day trip sponsored by the oil company without somebody asking for something,” Zwonitzer said.

Experts say the Azeris are looking to both compete with the Armenian lobby in the U.S. and also show their bosses back home they are simply accomplishing something. “In part they’re taking their cues from things the Armenian-American groups have done in California where they’ve gotten cities or state governments to pass similar kinds of resolutions on behalf of Armenia and Nagorno-Karabakh,” said former U.S. Ambassador to Azerbaijan Richard Kauzlarich. Nagorno-Karabkh remains disputed between the two countries, and experts have warned for years that conflict could again break out over the territory.

“On a state level [the lobbying] is useless, but mostly it is for domestic consumption,” said Elmar Chakhtakhtinski, the president of Azerbaijani Americans for Democracy, a U.S.-based opposition group. “They’re trying to please [Aliyev], they’re trying to do something.”

This is all happening as Azerbaijan has drawn sharp criticism worldwide for its treatment of its people. The Council of Europe criticized Azerbaijan earlier in May as the country was assuming its chairmanship of the ministerial committee, saying that the situation there “is a more than worrying state of affairs for a member state taking up the chairmanship of the Committee of Ministers.”

U.S. Ambassador to Azerbaijan Richard Morningstar also publicly rebuked the country during his speech at the U.S.-Azerbaijan Convention in April in Washington, which was co-sponsored by SOCAR and organized by the Assembly of the Friends of Azerbaijan and featured many of the same lawmakers who had traveled to Baku.

“The elephant in the room regarding our relationship is in the area of democracy and human rights,” Morningstar said. “We seem to talk past each other. We are who we are and hold strong democratic values. When we see what we think are abuses we speak out.”

correction

An earlier version of this story misstated the circumstances under which Fethullah Gulen left Turkey. This story has also been changed to reflect the fact that Oksuz no longer owns TDM Contracting.JUNE 3, 2014, 12:13 a.m.

Source: buzzfeed.com

Council of Europe committee condemns Azerbaijan for Safarov case

May 31, 2014 By administrator

The Committee on Legal Affairs and Human Rights of the Council of Europe condemned the use made by Azerbaijan of Article 12 of the Convention on the Transfer of Sentenced Persons in the case of Ramil Safarov, ” which constitutes a violation of the principle of good faith in international relations and the principles of the rule of law. “

The Convention on the Transfer of Sentenced Persons provides for the transfer of foreign prisoners to their country of origin. She goes first and foremost a humanitarian purpose, to improve the prospects for rehabilitation and reintegration of prisoners into society.

The draft resolution based on the report of Christopher Chope (United Kingdom, EDG), is concerned that the Convention has been invoked to justify the immediate release after the transfer in Azerbaijan Ramil Safarov, Azerbaijani sentenced for murder of an Armenian colleague who attended a training course “Partner for Peace” organized by NATO in Hungary. Upon his arrival in Azerbaijan, it was hailed as a national hero, was immediately pardoned long before the expiration of the minimum sentence imposed by the Hungarian court, received a retroactive promotion and was rewarded for his gesture in many other ways .

The text stresses that the Convention “is not intended to be used for the immediate release of detainees after their return to their country of origin.” It stresses “the importance of implementing the Convention in good faith and in interpreting these provisions, to comply with the principles of the rule of law”, particularly in the case of transfer may have political or diplomatic implications .

The draft resolution should be submitted to the Assembly for debate before the end of 2014.

A sports Turkish name Noyan repressed in Baku airport because his name had an Armenian sounding!

May 30, 2014 By administrator

A case which could spoil the honeymoon between Ankara and Baku. Arrived in Baku for the European Championships in wrestling, an athlete Turkish Zafer Noyan was deported from Baku airport and returned to Turkey, because his name was Armenian sounding! Zafer Noyan (24 years) was turned upon his arrival in Azerbaijan Azerbaijani customs pretext that Armenian stay … Yet the Turkish sports insisted that his name was not Armenian and he was not Armenian . Nothing helped. He was released on a plane to return to Istanbul. The press and the Turkish media have seized on this case which caused a scandal and perfectly demonstrates the undemocratic spirit of Azerbaijan through its officials orders Aliyev.

Krikor Amirzayan

Artsakh defense army says number of casualties never concealed

May 30, 2014 By administrator

May 30, 2014 – 17:44 AMT

The defense army of the Nagorno Karabakh (Artsakh) Republic has refuted yet another lie of the Azerbaijani propaganda claiming that the Armenian party “conceals the number of casualties.”

“We always report about the incidents that take place in our army. Hiding data is our rival’s work style, which is applied to avoid public indignation,” the NKR army’s press office said.

An Armenian soldier was killed in Azeri sabotage attempt in the southern direction of the line of contact on the night of May 28. On spotting the rival, the NKR army units acted to repel the attack, with 2 dead and 1 injured on Azeri side. The NKR defense army serviceman, corporal Erik Gasparyan, 19, died in action.

The real number of casualties in the Azeri armed forces is almost twice higher than that mentioned in official statistical data, the NKR army said.

Not to seem proofless, the Karabakh defense army presented the list of the Azerbaijani servicemen who were killed in non-combat incidents, as result of harassment, lack of restraint and corruption.

According to Doctrina Azeri military research, most of deaths in the Azeri army was caused by suicides and injuries inflicted by the soldiers themselves.

Source: PanARMENIAN.Net

Large military exercises of Azerbaijan near the Armenian border positions

May 28, 2014 By administrator

Azerbaijan conducts military exercises very large near the Armenian-Azerbaijani border lines and defensive positions of Armenian forces. These exercises are followed by Zakir Hasanov, Azerbaijani Defense Minister according to the official news agency APA Azeri. Many corps such as infantry, air forces, the demining groups, anti-air units involved in these exercises with a goal in the immediate vicinity of the Armenian positions is to impress .. . Meanwhile, Azerbaijan launcher unsuccessfully-elite commandos on the Armenian positions. During the last held on the night of May 28, two military Azerbaijanis were killed and a third was wounded due to the rapid reaction of the Armenians.

Krikor Amirzayan