THE return to home and freedom of Ramil Safarov, an Azeri military officer and convicted murderer, has prompted one of central Europe’s biggest diplomatic storms. It has pulled in Russia, America and the European Union, and led to a new war of words in one of the world’s most volatile regions.

Safarov used an axe to murder a sleeping fellow student, an Armenian officer called Gurgen Margarjan, while both men were at a NATO English-language course in Budapest in 2004. Safarov justified himself by referring to Armenian atrocities against Azerbaijan in the conflict of 1988-94. He told the court that Lieutenant Margarjan, an Armenian, had taunted him about the contested region of Nagorno-Karabakh from where he was a refugee.

«Highlights», ХII.2004
Vladimir KAZIMIROV

KARABAKH AND UN SECURITY COUNCIL RESOLUTIONS

The resolutions of UN Security Council are among the decisive documents in the modern international life. All the UN member-countries, of course, focus their attention on the complete and well-timed (and not postponed or selective) fulfillment of those documents. There are 4 resolutions on Karabakh conflict (822, 853, 874 and 884). All of them were adopted in the heat of Karabakh war, from April 30 to November 12, 1993.

Azerbaijan is no Lithuania. True, resurgent nationalism arouses people in the Caucasus just as it arouses the Baltic republics. But there the comparison ends – and the trouble for Moscow begins.

Nationalists in Lithuania are struggling to wrest independence from Moscow by nonviolent, political means. Nationalists in Azerbaijan also talk of independence, but their protest includes bloody pogroms against their Armenian neighbors. Nor do Azerbaijani nationalists limit their actions to Soviet Azerbaijan. They transgress the border with Iran to make common cause with Azerbaijanis there.