Category: Eastern Europe

Military Relations between Azerbaijan and Turkey

After the collapse of USSR, necessaries of new states were that economic, politic, military and educational relations with each other and other international platforms and countries. On that way all former Soviet countries created Commonwealth of Independence States union. With creation of CIS, these countries which were unificated on old Soviet map will create new relations on the new world system. Also for regulating new systems, geopolitical situation was very important. Firstly a state can create strong relations where it was near another state.

If we describe relations between Turkey and Azerbaijan, we will see influence of border factor. Strong relations of Turkey with Azerbaijan are result of near abroad condition.
Cooperations of Turkey and Azerbaijan had been decreased sometimes. But it ended in new powerful authorities.

Pro Russian politics of Ayaz Muttalibov influenced Turkish relations as only embassy found. In short time of Muttalibov administrative Turkey was working to make new perspective for other Turkish countries.

Ebulfez Elchibey who came to power after Muttalibov followed new way Pro Turkish politics as opposite to Muttalibov. So many agreements had been created in economy, military, education, energy, politics and new activities started. First military cooperations between Azerbaijan and Turkey borned in that time.

In 1992 military education agreement signed between Azerbaijani and Turkish government. In this period Azerbaijan was working to create international pressure circumstances on Armenia about Nagorno Karabakh conflict. So military agreements with Turkey, created new tensions in this region. We can say a diminish symbol with Russia as military.

Military conventions were less than next years in new political actions to make strong authority and balanced actions period. Haydar Aliyev’s balance political way made a cooperation as pragmatist mind of Azerbaijan. We will see importance of Turkish military agreements. Because if Azerbaijan want to be important actor on this region, it should regulate new relations for the USA and NATO via Turkey.

In 1996 between the government of the Republic of Azerbaijan and the government of the Republic of Turkey on base of cooperation of staff members of supporting service of Armed Forces protocol signed.

In 1997 between the government of the Republic of Azerbaijan and the government of the Republic of Turkey on regulation of civil and military flying in 10 km of astride Azerbaijan-Turkey border protocol signed.

In that time agreements of Azerbaijan with Iran and Russia were targeting only friendship situation and solve problems on bounds And agreements with the USA were not totally military cooperations. It is important to not forget that Russian embargo on Azerbaijan because of Chechen problem increased Turkish inclination on military subjects. Strong relations with Turkey of Azerbaijan will create new diplomatical positions from Cyprus to Yerevan.

Military positions as international importance of Azerbaijan borned with agreement between the government of the Republic of Azerbaijan and the government of the Republic of Turkey on activities of platoon of Azerbaijan is going to the Kosovo in the staff of Turkey battalion.
Azerbaijan will keep its soldiers untill period of independence of Kosovo. With this step Azerbaijan became an important and strategical country on extend to East policy of NATO. Azerbaijan won a good position on Caucasus region with taking some other militaryal duties via Turkey in different countries.

In 2000 between the Ministry of defense of the Republic of Azerbaijan and Head of Naval Forces of Republic of Turkey about giving the attack launch of AB-34 P-134 to the Azerbaijan protocol signed and :

– Protocol between the Ministry of defense of the Republic of Azerbaijan and Ministry of national security of Republic of Turkey on cooperation in the topographical area,
– Protocol between the Republic of Azerbaijan and the Republic of Turkey on forming and training of profession school of forces kind of Baku,
– Protocol between the Ministry of defense of the Republic of Azerbaijan and the General Staff of the Republic of Turkey on carrying out of the material and technical purchasing,
– Agreement between the government of the Republic of Azerbaijan and the government of the Republic of Turkey on military industry cooperation signed.

In 2001 between the Ministry of Defense of the Republic of Azerbaijan and the General Staff of the Republic of Turkey on development of Nakhchivan 5th army protocol;

In 2002 Ministry of defense of the Republic of Azerbaijan and the General Staff of the Republic of Turkey on cooperation in the area of war history, military archive and museum work and military publication protocol and in 2003 between the government of the Republic of Azerbaijan and the government of the Republic of on training, material and technical assistance of State Border Service of Azerbaijan by Armed Forces of Turkey and Protocol between Azerbaijan, Georgia and Turkey on cooperation in the safety of the West-East energy corridor protocol signed.

Since 1999 Azerbaijan took steps quickly. As opposite to Azerbaijan and Turkey, Armenia and Greece signed an agreement as “Send Armenian soldiers to Kosovo via Greek army”. Armenian parliament agreed this on 13 December 2003. According to this agreement 30 Armenian soldiers had gone to Kosovo with ratification of Ministry of Defence of Armenia. It had been explained as to support European-Atlantic integration on South Caucasus. Against to modernization of Azerbaijan by Turkish Military Forces, Greece take a decision to support to Armenian army. Also military cooperations created influences on political problems. In that time mix circumstances about these events will share a balance of situations on energy and trade agreements.

After the September 11 terrorist acts, Azerbaijan supported the decision of counter attack to terrorism of the USA. So it sent some peacekeepers to Afghanistan and opened air space for American forces. These actions share Turkish support and modernisation to Azerbaijani army. Azerbaijan use this experiment to be main actor in the region.

In 2004 and 2005 between the government of the Republic of Azerbaijan and the government of the Republic of Turkey on long-term economical and military cooperation and between the Ministry of Defense of the Republic of Azerbaijan and the General Staff of the Republic of Turkey on application of the financial aid protocol signed.

And in 2006 between the Ministry of Defense of the Republic of Azerbaijan and the General Staff of the Republic of Turkey on application of material and technical provision protocol shared new improvements of new actor.

Since 2006 new approaches regulated cooperations with other states :
– Supports of Azerbaijan to Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus,
– Turkey purchases rockets from the USA,
– New relations of Georgia, Azerbaijan and Turkey as result of alternative energy way against to Russia.

Same year new circumstances created balance regulations for Azerbaijan with agreement of natural gas project with Greece. It was political and militaryal goal of Azerbaijan because Yerevan loosed its good militaryal and political relations with Greece. So it must choose a new way as balance politics.

There is a balance activities with military cooperations of Azerbaijani relations from the independence time. Pro Turkish military activities regulated international perspective on problems of Azerbaijan. Example, mainly Azerbaijan use Cyprus card about Greek support to Armenia. And also it used totally the USA and NATO supports and created new politics as alternative to Russia. We can say thay experiments of Elchibey’s totally Pro Turkish politics and Aliyev’s balance politics which agree all region as a whole will regulate positions of Caucasus region.

Mehmet Fatih ÖZTARSU / Baku Qafqaz University

November 24, 2008
Uzbek History Textbook Denounces Soviet Totalitarianism But Downplays Popular Movements in Uzbekistan

Paul Goble

Kuressaare, November 21 – A history textbook prepared for tenth graders in Uzbekistan on the Soviet period denounces communist totalitarianism in sweeping terms, but it downplays popular movements that have struggled for democracy in that Central Asian country in recent years and ignores many events that the current Tashkent regime finds inconvenient.
Because most people “conceive the history of their country as [they] are told about it in school,” Mariya Yanovskaya says in an article posted on the Ferghana.ru portal, history as presented in school texts is one of the most sensitive political issues in many countries, including all the post-Soviet states (www.ferghana.ru/article.php?id=5959).
Recently, there have been intense discussions over new texts in the Russian Federation which portray Stalin’s terror as an appropriate modernization technique and school books in Ukraine that argue the 1932-33 famine was a genocide that Moscow launched against the Ukrainian people.
Because the media inside Uzbekistan is more tightly controlled than in either of those countries, this history textbook is unlikely to provoke similar debates. But that makes Yanovskaya’s review especially important because it provides important insights into what the next generation of Uzbeks is likely to think about their past and hence their future.
The book opens with the following declaration: “Dear Students! The textbook which you are holding in your hands covers the most complex and contradictory period of the history of the Fatherland, a period of heavy losses, tragic events and also of heroic struggle for freedom and independence, a period of victories and defeats and of self-sacrificing labor of our people.”
Then, Yanovskaya says, the book stresses that the Uzbeks not only resisted but hated Soviet power from the beginning. It denounces the Bolshevik destruction of the Kokand autonomy, pointing out that the Bolsheviks and their Red Army allies killed more than 100,000 people in that city alone.
“The basic part of the indigenous population did not recognize the Bolsheviks or the Soviet system,” the text says, in large measure because that system pursued “a colonialist policy,” sought to destroy religion, and acted in other ways to denigrate the dignity of the people of Uzbekistan.
The Uzbeks and the other peoples of Central Asia struggled for many years in a movement that the Soviets dismissively call “the basmachi movement” but which the people there referred as “the freeman’s movement,” the textbook continues in increasingly emotional terms.
And the book points out that “the totalitarian regime destroyed not only thousands of fighters who sacrificed themselves for the interests of the people but also tens of thousands of innocent victims. Soviet power throughout the ensuing years continued to conduct a repressive policy which brought the population much grief and suffering.”
In other passages, the new textbook talked about Stalinist crimes “against whole peoples” during and after World War II, a reference to the deportation of nationalities which it calls “unforgivable criminal acts.” The book talks about the brutal transformation of Uzbek society and the Uzbek economy by Moscow and its agents.
Yanovskaya says that she “would like to read such lines” in a textbook prepared by Moscow historians for schools in the Russian Federation, but her comments throughout the review make it clear that she doesn’t have that chance now and does not expect to have it anytime soon.
But as the Uzbek textbook deals with more recent events, she says, it falls far short of what she would like to see in three respects. First, it utterly fails to explain how the Soviet Union in fact brought some real benefits to the people there, benefits that led them to vote overwhelmingly for the preservation of the USSR.
“About that referendum,” she writes, “there is not a word in the textbook,” although “like a red thread” throughout this period it specifies that “the dream of independence never left the minds and hearts of advanced people. … In the heart of the people never were extinguished a striving for independence and dreams about the freedom of the Fatherland.”
And it suggests in her words “that when Islam Abduganiyevich Karimov came to power, the dreams were realized. The country is now happy, independent and proceeding in giant steps toward a bright future, which is being build under the leadership … [and Yanovskaya says she almost wrote “ ‘the communist party.’”
Second, the textbook specifically criticizes those national movements which sought democracy rather than the solidification of the Karimov regime. “One of the main errors of the ‘Birlik’ movement,” the textbook insists, “consisted in its lack of understanding of the true interests of our people.”
Its activists “involved themselves with the organization of meetings and demonstrations thus putting psychological pressure on local leaders and searching for errors and shortcomings in the activity of the government and local organs of power. Therefore, the movement could not capture the support of the broad strata of the population.”
And as for the Erk Party, the textbook simply says that it “did not have a precise program for the construction of a new society,” the kind of language and attitude about opponents that was such a prominent feature of Soviet textbooks and that continues to inform, albeit with new targets, the textbooks of Uzbekistan and other post-Soviet states.
And third, and again like Soviet textbooks, the Uzbek history text simply ignores many inconvenient events or describes them in such generalized terms that only those who already know something about the history of the republic could possibly understand as references to these events.
Thus, there is not a single word about the destructive earthquake in Tashkent in April 1966, nor is there any real information about the conflicts with the Meskhetian Turks or with the Kyrgyz in the late 1980s or about “the modernizing, developing and innovative role” of Moscow and the Soviet system in the development of Uzbekistan.
In short, she suggests, the children of Uzbekistan are getting a Soviet-style version of reality, albeit one in which the things Moscow took pride in are denounced and the things Moscow denounced are praised, a pattern that does no more to promote independent thought than did the one in the Soviet textbooks. But that of course is almost certainly the point.

http://windowoneurasia.blogspot.com/2008/11/window-on-eurasia-uzbek-history.html

November 21, 2008
Financial Crisis May Force Moscow to Make Concessions to Non-Russians

Paul Goble

Kuressaare, November 18 – Despite the human suffering it is bringing, the current financial crisis may force Moscow to make concessions to non-Russian groups because in the past, the Russian government – tsarist, Soviet and post-Soviet — has done so “only when the state has serious problems,” according to a senior Tatar politician.
In an interview with Rosbaltvolga.ru, Razil’ Valeyev, who chairs the nationality policy committee in the State Council of the Republic of Tatarstan, pointed out that Moscow created the non-Russian republics after the 1917 revolution and opened “hundreds” of non-Russian language newspapers during World War II (www.rosbaltvolga.ru/2008/11/17/542241.html).
Consequently, Valeyev argued, one should not exclude the possibility that as the economic crisis deepens, it will lead the central government to address some of the problems of the non-Russians in the country, perhaps in the first instance reversing what he calls the “unconstitutional” elimination of non-Russian courses from required educational programs.
If the law goes into force, Regions and republics would still be allowed to offer non-Russian language and local history courses, but they would no longer be able to require them. And consequently, some students and their parents would thus be inclined to choose to study other courses instead, something that would strike a blow at many non-Russian groups.
“The exclusion of the national-regional component from the federal education standards [scheduled to take place in 2009] directly contradicts the Russian Constitution,” he said. “And if we do not follow the provisions of our own constitution as any state based on law does, then what kind of a country are we?”
Valeyev pointed out that Tatarstan has been fighting this step for several years and not long ago sent an appeal not only to Moscow but to all the federal subjects asking that it be reversed as unconstitutional. So far, he says, 21 other subjects – including some Russian ones — support Tatarstan’s position, but until recently, it seemed unlikely Moscow would change course.
One of the reasons the Russian government has adopted this policy, the Tatar State Council committee chairman continues, is that “empire-forming peoples cannot understand the problems of other peoples.” While there are exceptions, of course, “the majority of government officials are not among them.”
Asked whether he was fighting against globalization, Valeyev said that “globalization is affecting everyone and not just the Tatars,” and many Tatars now send their children to Russian language schools so that they can pursue the careers that such educations offer in the country as a whole.
Even more will do so if non-Russian subjects become optional because they will see that Moscow has a negative attitude toward national education and “understand that if they do not change, their children will not become part of contemporary realities and participate in the state’s mentality.”
There are other reasons parents are making these decisions. Many Tatar schools were opened only a few years ago and often lack the facilities Russian-language schools there have. That has made the Turkic-Tatar lycees that Ankara opened in the republic far more important than they otherwise would be, lycees that Moscow unfortunately is trying to close.
Asked to respond to suggestions that Tatar national identity is too focused on the past rather than the future, Valeyev said that peoples like the Tatars who have been deprived of statehood and who fear they may not recover it naturally look back to the time when they had it, especially if they have been denied the chance to do so as the Tatars were in Soviet times.
Valeyev said that the Tatars do not want the Russian Federation to fall apart but rather to be strengthened, however much Russian nationalists think otherwise, but at the same time, he noted, the Tatars want Moscow to respect their constitutional rights, something the center is not always doing.
But “if Russia wants to preserve its future and to be strengthened, then it must turn particular attention “to the issues the Tatars raise. “We are not going to go anywhere, we do not have a second state.” And consequently, Tatars and Russians must cooperate if they are to have a good future together.
At present, Valeyev stressed, Tatarstan is “resolving many questions more or less normally. We are concerned most of all about the status of Tatars living beyond the borders of the republic [where most ethnic Tatars live and] who have enormous problems in the sphere of preserving language and culture.”
“If Russia were to adopt a new, democratic conception of nationality policy … and the laws and decrees needed for its realization, then there would not be any special problems” in the relationship between Moscow and Kazan, Valeyev said, adding that “I have not lost hope that we despite everything will come to that.”
“Russia too ought to have an instinct for self-preservation,” he continued. If, however, it is completely lost, then additional complications will appear. But the process of the rebirth of national consciousness is not something that happens over night.” Thus, there is time, but it is not unlimited, perhaps no more than “20 or 30 years.”
Russia needs to become what it is, the common home of Slavic and Turkic peoples, he argued in conclusion. And he said that was not as impossible as it might seem: “Who could have thought that the Soviet Union would fall apart and in its place would arise independent states – Kyrgyzstan, Kazakhstan, Turkmenistan and so on, not to mention Abkhazia and South Ossetia.”

http://windowoneurasia.blogspot.com/2008/11/window-on-eurasia-financial-crisis-may.html

November 18, 2008
Russian defense minister warns of another, worse Georgian war

ANKARA, November 18 (RIA Novosti) – The Russian defense minister warned on Tuesday that Georgia’s military buildup and drive to join NATO could cause a conflict worse than the five-day war over South Ossetia in August.

Russia and Georgia fought a brief war in August after Tbilisi launched an offensive in an attempt to regain control of breakaway South Ossetia. Moscow subsequently recognized the republic and Abkhazia, another separatist Georgian region, as independent states.

“We are worried by the military buildup being conducted by the Georgian authorities and the country’s drive toward NATO. These moves could cause a conflict worse than the August events,” Anatoly Serdyukov said after talks in Ankara with Turkish Defense Minister Mehmet Gonul.

At a summit in April, NATO member states decided to put off a decision on whether to grant Membership Action Plans to Georgia and Ukraine until December. Their bids have received strong U.S. backing, but ran into opposition from some European alliance members, including Germany and France, who said that opening the path to membership for the two former Soviet republics would unnecessarily antagonize Moscow.

Russian President Dmitry Medvedev told journalists on Tuesday that Russia would have no contacts with Georgia’s current government but expressed the hope that despite the August armed conflict relations between Russian and Georgian people would not deteriorate.

“We will have no contacts at all with the current regime and we view their policies as criminal,” Medvedev said.

November 18, 2008
TURKEY AGREES TO TRAIN MULLAHS AND IMAMS FOR RUSSIA

The Turkish government has signed an agreement with the Union of Muftis of Russia (SMR) to train imams and mullahs for Russian mosques. The SMR leadership hailed this decision because of what it described as the secular nature of Turkey and hence that country’s understanding of what Islam should be in a country like Russia (www.interfax-religion.ru/islam/?act=news&div=27334).

November 17, 2008
U.S. State Department strives to put Kyrgyzstan under control

14/11-2008 14:46, Bishkek – News Agency “24.kg”,

By Anton LYMAR

“Kyrgyzstan is located in the very heart of Central Asia, which makes it possible to influence Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, Kazakhstan and even China. To have this region under control is the main aim of the U.S. State Department’s current policy,” independent experts of the Russian media observer Russian Peacekeeper said.

Today Condoleezza Rice is the main idea generator in issues of the “Central Asian states’ domestication”. Here she has overbid even her teacher Zbigniew Brzezinski. Kyrgyzstan, in her eyes, is a key to settling all tensions in Central Asian region. If Kyrgyzstan is a ‘key’, it should be ‘kept in a pocket’. It is a long-studied method.

“It is enough to remember that before the ‘tulip revolution’ in Kyrgyzstan, staff of the U.S. embassy in Bishkek counted at least 30-40 persons. This number grew dramatically right before the revolution, and now counts up to 150 workers. It is strange why the United States has such a large-numbered diplomatic mission in a country, which is way far from the world leading states,” the experts wonder.

Source: eng.24.kg, 14-11-2008

November 17, 2008