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Category: Southern Caucasus

Southern flank is strategically important to Russia

Gulnara Inandzh

Director, Ethnoglobus

An International Online Information and Analysis Center,

(ethnoglobus.az), editor of Russian section of Turkishnews American-Turkish Resource website www.turkishnews.com , mete62@inbox.ru

The North Caucasus, which is bordered by two regional states, Azerbaijan and Georgia, is strategically important to Russia. For the preservation of peace in the southern portion of the country, the federal center along with the use of force is conducting economic reforms meant to provide new work places, an improvement in the standard of living of the population, and a reduction in the amount of out-migration.

Economic weakness and a lack of social development in such a strategically important region represent a serious danger for the state integrity of Russia, because among the reasons that its citizens and especially young people in the south are turning to radical Islamist groups are poverty and unemployment. Consequently, Moscow believes that changes in these areas will turn people away from radicalism and return them to normal civic life.

Over the last several years, the Russian government, with this goal in mind, has begun the planned development of this region by means of the involvement of investors, including foreign ones. At the same time, however, considering the efforts of foreign governments to promote separatism, including in the North Caucasus, Russia has been quite cautious about any foreign role in the economy of that region and not allowed outside investors access to its economy. In particular, Turkish investors were pushed out of the region and Circassians now living abroad were not provided with opportunities to invest in their historical homeland.

Because it lacks geopolitical ambitions in the North Caucasus and because it has no desire to become the instrument of outside games in the region, Azerbaijan has become a successful and trusted source of capital investment in the economy of the south of the Russian Federation. Many factors have contributed to this, including Baku’s economic potential, the similarity of outlooks, natural infrastructure, a major market, among others.

The 2010 state border agreement between Baku and Moscow promoted the opening of the North Caucasus economic zone for Azerbaijani business. In the summer of 2011, A.G. Khloponin, the deputy head of the Russian government and the special representative of the Russian President to the North Caucasus Federal District, together with the heads of all North Caucasian republics, came to Baku to discuss Azerbaijani investments. Immediately after this, Azerbaijan’s economic development minister Shahin Mustafayev visited seven republics of the North Caucasus. That was followed by a series of business forums and meetings of businessmen. [1]

Reflecting its particular attention to economic cooperation with Azerbaijan in this area, the plenipotentiary representation of the Russian President in the North Caucasus created a special council for control over the execution of the decisions concerning the federal subjects in the region, and it has plans to open a representation of this plenipotentiary in Azerbaijan. As deputy plenipotentiary representative Sergey Subbotin observed, “Before the leaders of the North Caucasus Federation District have been given the task of developing relations with Azerbaijan and the time has come for checking the effectiveness of the measures taken to address this task. The effective resolution of all tasks depends in the first instance on effective control.” [2]

The involvement of Azerbaijani business is especially evident in the Stavropol and Krasnodar regions of Russia. In 2009, for example, Azerbaijan occupied third place in the amount of foreign trade with Stavropol, with its total being 123.3 million US dollars or 8.7 percent of the trade turnover of the kray. Azerbaijani trade turnover with Krasnodar in that year was 71.4 million US dollars.

Azerbaijan’s Azersun Holdings Company in the following year, to give but one example, opened a tea processing factory in Belorechensk in Krasnodar kray valued at more than three million US dollars annually. That company has begun construction of a new preserves factory for a similar sum. And that company alone has invested 22 million US dollars in the development of the infrastructure of Krasnodar kray. Furthermore, Azerbaijan’s Matanat-A company in September 2011 began building a construction materials factory in Krasnodar’s Uspensky District, a project estimated to cost 30 million euros.

Daghestan has the largest trade turnover with foreign countries, but the involvement of Azerbaijani business in that neighboring republic still remains at the stage of discussions. After the signing in 2010 of the inter-governmental agreement on cooperation in the rational use and protection of the water resources of the Samur River, the construction of a hydroelectric station on that river should permit the development of the infrastructure of Daghestan and Azerbaijani districts bordering it.

No less interesting is the project of the construction of a Trans-Samur highway (Derbent-Akhty-Rutul, across the Bagos pass by tunnel, and the construction of an Avar-Kakhti road connecting Botlikh, Buynaksk and Makhachkala) in order to supply southern Daghestan and Azerbaijan. The new highway will provide access into and out of Southern and Mountainous Daghestan. [3]

Azerbaijani capital is involved in the agricultural and construction sectors of the North Caucasus Federal District. A Stavropol company has reached agreement with the Azerbaijani agricultural ministry about a tender to sell agricultural technology produced there to the Azerbaijani Republic.

There has also been cooperation in tourism and resorts. Because the North Caucasus has resorts developed in Soviet times and even further back, Azerbaijani businessmen are finding that Moscow is extremely interested in involving them in the redevelopment of these facilities. A. Khloponin has suggested that Moscow will provide state guarantees and insurance for investments in this area. [4]

It is clear that there is a need to establish free trade zones in this region in order to allow for the freer flow of goods and services and workers between southern Russia and Azerbaijan and to provide a framework for attracting additional Azerbaijani investors. And that may happen given that the Russian side is seeking to move economic relations between Azerbaijan and the North Caucasus Federal District beyond just trade. All this shows—and this is the key point—that Russia now trusts its southern flank to Azerbaijan.

Notes

[1] See (accessed 14 November 2012).

[2] See http://fineko/abc.az (accessed 14 November 2012).

[3] See https://www.turkishnews.com/ru/content/2012/11/06/ (accessed 14 November 2012).

[4] See http://fineko/abc.az (accessed 14 November 2012).

sourse ADA Biweekly Newsletter

December 9, 2012
“The Armenian Triumph in Istanbul” book is published

“Chess in Armenia” has published a new book by Gaguik Oganessian – “The Armenian Triumph in Istanbul”. This book is dedicated to the wonderful victory of the Armenian National Team in the 40th World Chess Olympiad. Armchess.am informs about this.

The author, who himself was following this great sport event, presents the most interesting episodes of the Olympiad, the details of the Armenian chess players’ performances with the eyes of a witness.

All the games played in Istanbul by the Armenian Olympic champions – Levon Aronian, Sergei Movsesian, Vladimir Akopian, Gabriel Sargissian, Tigran Petrosian, response from the Armenian Diaspora, important materials that represent the history of Olympiads as well as numerous color photos are included in this book.

via “The Armenian Triumph in Istanbul” book is published.

November 28, 2012
They Moved to Turkey In Order to Buy a House In Armenia

A Stroll Through Istanbul – Part 3

When I asked Artash from Gyumri why he wound up in Istanbul, the young man answered, “The cheapest ticket I could find brought me here.”

After getting discharged from the army, Artash couldn’t find work in Armenia. He came to Turkey with his mother and sister.

Artash works in a small shoe factory alongside other Armenians, Georgians, Turks and Kurds in the Kumkapı neighborhood of Istanbul. He says he’s gotten a lay of the land and knows who to make friends with and who to stay away from.

He says that if you treat people normally, they will do the same back.

Artash’s family lost their home in the 1988 earthquake. His mother raised the kids by herself in one of those temporary wagon shelters.

Back in Gyumri, Artash worked at a small amusement park for peanuts. He says he’d rather work illegally inTurkeyand make enough money to make a real difference in his life.

Artash says the police know everyone who is working illegally. It’s just a matter of not getting into trouble or making trouble. If you do, the authorities will let you go about your business.

“Otherwise, the cops can stop you on the street at any moment. In a few days they’ll send you back topArmenia.”

Artash’s mother Zima works as a housekeeper for a Turkish family. She cleans, cooks the meals and takes care of the old folk. His sister works at the gold market inIstanbul.

Artash has been tasked with the job of saving enough money to buy a house in Yerevan or Gyumri. He says he has no intention of permanently staying inTurkey.

The young man confesses that some people from Armeniahave found success in Istanbul but that they avoid talking about it.

“People are afraid to say too much. There’s a lot of theft going on here. Armenians have no qualms about stealing from other Armenians. There are Armenians who go into business with Turks, but since the Armenians are illegal all the paperwork is registered in their partners’ names,” Artash says.

Artash’s mom has had trouble adjusting to Istanbul, but she’s not one to voice her concerns. Her main objective in life now is to be able to buy a home for her kids.

“Do you think I wanted to come here? Armenians are an industrious people. They are ruining Armenia. I would have stayed in my homeland and worked. This isn’t our country. No matter how well the Turks treat us, it’s not the same,” says an emotional Zina.

Photos: Saro Baghdasaryan

via They Moved to Turkey In Order to Buy a House In Armenia | Hetq online.

November 16, 2012
Turkey aims to hinder Genocide 100th anniv. preparation

PanARMENIAN.Net – Turkey is concerned with Armenias’ preparations for the Genocide 100th anniversary in 2015, Istanbul-based Agos weekly former employee said.

As Diran Lokmagyozian told a news conference, the Turks think Armenians worldwide are making large-scale preparations for 2015, with Ankara deeming it necessary to take counteractive steps.

“It’s like a football match, with one of the contenders to win,” he said, slamming Armenia’s foreign policy as unspecified and characterizing it as wait and see one.

via Turkey aims to hinder Genocide 100th anniv. preparation – journalist – PanARMENIAN.Net.

November 4, 2012
Armenia and Turkey: Let us be Friends for Once

Commentary — By Milena Abrahamyan on October 21, 2012 9:00 am

Original artwork from the Beyond Borders project/ by Milena Abrahamyan

The conflict, if it can be called that, between Turkey and Armenia, is an unusual one. It is more like a 100-year-old post-conflict that has been locked up and forgotten, at least on the Turkish side of the border. In Armenia it is much more difficult to ignore the real effects of that contested history. Inasmuch as this “post-conflict” has to do with the early 20th century Ottoman policy of extermination of non-Muslim minorities within Turkey, including the genocide of Armenians living there before 1915, it has also evolved to include the interests of more powerful countries. The presence of U.S. military bases in Turkey and Russian military bases in Armenia is no coincidence. The issue is further complicated by Turkish alliance with Azerbaijan regarding the Nagorno-Karabagh war.

So far, peace talks between the two governments have yielded no results. Although civil society occasionally engages in peace building activities across the closed Turkish-Armenia border, women’s issues are almost never on the frontline. Yet much of the nationalism and violence that has built and continues to build the borders of these two countries relies on the subordination of women, ensuring that their place within society stays within the private sphere. Women are supposed to be the mothers of the nation. They are supposed to be housewives, to give birth to boys. They are supposed to be polite and courteous, and they are supposed to remain silent. They are not taken seriously enough on either side of the border to be granted a seat at the negotiating table, although they are often the first to suffer the effects of violence, conflict and war.

Unfortunately, the decade long closure of the Turkish-Armenian border has also led to an atmosphere of ignorance on both sides, making it harder to imagine the “other” as anything other than a stereotype. A 2005 opinion survey [PDF] taken on both sides of the border revealed that a large percentage of respondents in Turkey did not know much about Armenia and that many of the respondents in Armenia had strong negative prejudices against their neighboring Turkey. In a way, both peoples have placed themselves inside of “cultural ghettos”, to use Elif Shafak’s term, and are now suffering as a result. In a speech on the power of storytelling, the prominent Turkish novelist states: “One way of transcending these cultural ghettos is through the art of storytelling. Stories cannot demolish frontiers, but they can punch holes in our mental walls and through those walls, we can get a glimpse of the other and sometimes even like what we see.”

In light of this, a group of women from Armenia and Turkey have come together and initiated the Beyond Borders: Linking Our Stories project. This project will do away with the middle man. Literally. We believe that women should take peace into their own hands and one way to begin is by sitting down with one another, across borders and across difference, to tell our stories. This method will aid in the compassion that both sides need to have and the healing that both sides need to do in order to build sustainable peace. Allowing peace negotiations that happen at higher levels of government, which often emphasize the importance of individual nations and their interests, to continue leading the way to peace will yield no lasting results. Allowing peace-building to happen within civil society without addressing the issues and needs of women will fail to build the kind of solidarity needed for both peoples to advance in any meaningful way.

The Beyond Borders: Linking Our Stories initiative is a collaboration between volunteers and staff of two women’s organizations in Armenia and Turkey. We aim to collect a number of interviews from women in both countries, to transcribe, translate and post each story on our blog, to hold a conference in Sirince, Turkey in July 2013 with 14 participants from both sides, to hold workshops on conflict transformation and theater techniques, and to produce a final performance based on the collected stories. We will also publish two books: one in Armenian and Turkish only, and one in English. A short film will be made documenting the meeting and the final performance in Sirince. And finally, a second performance and book release will be held in Yerevan, Armenia.

We are counting on people who believe in this project and want to work with us to transform the long standing conflicted relationship between Armenia and Turkey for support. Please visit our Kickstarter campaign page to donate, to learn more about the project and to share with your friends. The support we have gotten so far from people in many different parts of the world is encouraging and making us realize that this project is much needed and anticipated.

“The earth shall be left to no one,” the 13th century Sufi mystic, Jalāl ad-Dīn Muhammad Rūmī, says. “…let us be friends for once.”

via Armenia and Turkey: Let us be Friends for Once.

October 28, 2012
Using Cheese to Bridge the Turkey-Armenia Gap

By SUSANNE GÜSTEN

ISTANBUL — Artush Mkrtchyan calls it cheese diplomacy. Others speak of informal, or “track-two,” diplomacy. By either name, it is all about building bridges between Turks and Armenians in the absence of formal, or “track-one,” diplomatic relations between their governments.

Mr. Mkrtchyan, 55, an engineer, art critic and activist from the Armenian town of Gyumri has made cheese the medium of contact and cooperation with the neighboring town of Kars, in Turkey.

Less than 70 kilometers, or 45 miles, apart but separated by a border that has been closed for nearly two decades, cheese makers in Gyumri and Kars, along with colleagues in the nearby Georgian town of Ninotsminda, produce and market a “Caucasian cheese,” invented by Mr. Mkrtchyan in 2008 to foster cross-border cooperation.

“My cheese diplomacy actually preceded the soccer diplomacy between our countries,” Mr. Mkrtchyan said Monday as he walked into a meeting in Istanbul organized by Support to Armenian-Turkish Rapprochement, an umbrella group for like-minded activists from Turkey and Armenia.

He was referring to a brief rapprochement, kicked off by a visit by President Abdullah Gul of Turkey to Yerevan, Armenia, for a soccer World Cup qualifying match between the two countries’ teams in September 2008, followed by the visit of President Serzh Sargsyan of Armenia for the return match in Bursa, Turkey, in October 2009.

The visits seemed at the time to herald a breakthrough in relations between the two countries, which are weighed down by bitter disagreement over whether or not the 1915 massacres of Armenians in Anatolia amounted to genocide — and by the territorial dispute between Armenia and Azerbaijan over the enclave of Nagorno-Karabakh, in which Turkey has sided with Azerbaijan.

Although Turkey was among the first countries to recognize Armenia in 1991, after the dissolution of the Soviet Union, the border between the two countries has been closed since 1993, when Turkey suspended relations to protest Armenian advances on Azeri territory.

In the year framed by the two soccer matches, Armenia and Turkey — with the support of international mediators — negotiated and signed two protocols to re-establish diplomatic relations, open their border and foster economic, cultural and consular cooperation.

But faced with opposition from nationalists in both countries and pressure from Azerbaijan on Ankara, relations froze again within months. The protocols have never been submitted for parliamentary ratification in either country.

With presidential elections due in Armenia next year and in Turkey a year later, a new thaw is unlikely soon, Hasan Selim Ozertem, an Eurasian affairs expert at the International Strategic Research Organization, a private analytical institute in Ankara, said in an interview. “It is a vote-losing issue in both countries,” Mr. Ozertem said.

On top of that, Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey, bowing to veiled threats from Azerbaijan of gas-price increases and exclusion from pipeline projects, has vowed not to move forward with the protocols until the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict is resolved.

Still, the protocol process has not been a complete failure, Gevorg Ter-Gabrielyan, director of the nongovernmental Eurasia Partnership Foundation in Armenia, said in Istanbul this week. “Look at all the bonds that have been created here,” Mr. Ter-Gabrielyan said, indicating the crowd of businessmen, artists, social workers, journalists and academics from both countries exchanging hugs and greetings in Armenian, Turkish and English as they arrived for the meeting.

“These bonds collectively form a capacity of conflict prevention that did not exist five years ago,” Mr. Ter-Gabrielyan said. “This is a result of the boost by the protocol process.”

The activists, many of them bleary-eyed from the night flight from Yerevan that is the only link between the two countries, were gathered in Istanbul to review two years of track-two contacts, supported by a grant from the U.S. Agency for International Development, and to plot the way forward in the face of unfavorable political conditions and the imminent end of the grant.

Participants listened as an Armenian activist described the impression a visiting Turkish youth group had made on schoolchildren in an Armenian village. “The kids could not believe they were going to see a real Turk, it seemed so distant to them, so historical,” the activist, Gayane Mkrtchyan, said. Afterward, the children had remarked that the visitors “looked just like us,” she said.

Youth-group exchanges and media visits were among the activities sponsored by the Armenian-Turkish umbrella group, backed by the two-year Usaid grant that ends this month. Other activities included business conferences, a joint association of travel companies to foster regional tourism, academic workshops and cooperation on policy research, coproductions of films and other cultural projects.

“This kind of track-two diplomacy is really important,” Mr. Ozertem, the Eurasia expert, said by phone from Ankara. “When relations are bad between two countries, the damage deepens if there is no contact between societies.”

“This is damage control, and we need it,” he added.

With the Usaid funding running out this month, some projects have been successful enough to go forward on their own: The Armenia Turkey Cinema Platform, for one, hopes to show coproduced films at the Tribeca and Sundance festivals in the United States.

Yet frustration was tangible at the Istanbul meeting.

“I have been working for an open border since 1997, and I am tired of hitting my head against the wall,” said Arsen Ghazaryan, president of the Union of Manufacturers and Businessmen of Armenia. Still, he said, he would not stop trying. “It is the responsibility of our generation.”

Yurdum Hasgul Cagatay, a Turkish entrepreneur who recently led a group of Kurdish businessmen from the southeastern Turkish town of Diyarbakir to Yerevan to sign a cooperation agreement between the two towns’ Chambers of Commerce, was more upbeat on the same theme. “Open the border, we want to make money,” Ms. Cagatay said.

Much of the brainstorming in Istanbul centered on ways to draw the Armenian diaspora, widely seen as hard-line, into the process. Another focus was on how to keep up contacts, and momentum, after the end of the $2.4 million project. “In both countries we are few, we need to stay together,” said Mr. Ghazaryan, the Armenian business leader.

Mr. Ter-Gabrielyan, director of the Eurasia Partnership Foundation, said it would take several weeks to sift the proposals generated by the meeting and decide how to move forward.

In Gyumri, meanwhile, Mr. Mkrtchyan, the father of cheese diplomacy, has already moved on — to wine. Under the label “Caucasian Bouquet,” he has persuaded producers to start marketing their wines together — not only Turkish, Armenian and Georgian, but also wineries in Azerbaijan and Karabakh.

A version of this article appeared in print on October 25, 2012, in The International Herald Tribune

October 25, 2012