Among the participants of the conference were the President of CNIS, Dr. Leila Alieva, Professor of Middle East Technical University, Dr. Ayse Ayata, political analyst Zafar Guliyev, local expert from Sumgayit, Esabeli Mustafayev, as well as representatives of political parties and civil society, students.

Upon her opening remarks, Leila Alieva stressed the importance of discussions about political pluralism and electoral democracy in today’s Azerbaijan.

Doktor Maryam Orujlu talked about emergence of political pluralism and electoral traditions in Azerbaijan at the turn of XIX and XX centuries. Political analyst Zafar Guliyev shared his analysis about elections and pluralism in modern Azerbaijan while Esabeli Mustafayev made an interesting presentation about elections and political pluralism in the city of Sumgayit and challenges that they face.

Professor Dr. Ayse Ayata shared her insights about Turkey’s electoral history and experience as well as political pluralism.

At the end of the conference, the participants received a special CNIS edition titled “Democratic Values in the History of Azerbaijan.”

The conference was held within a project supported by the National Endowment for Democracy.

Among the guests of the conference dedicated to the 91th anniversary of Azerbaijan Democratic Republic, there was a professor of Ankara University Çinar Özen, the head of the Forum for Azerbaijan Eldar Namazov, Dr Kamran Ismayilov of National Academy of Sciences and Dr Elvan Aliyev from Ganja, as well as local intellectuals, civil society activists, students and journalists.

Professor Çinar Özen of Turkey shared some insights about his country’s experience of European integration and Eldar Namazov talked about problems and perspectives that Azerbaijan can face in the same road.

In the end of the meeting, the participants received a publication about previous CNIS conferences on Azerbaijan Democratic Republic and its heritage.

Historic breakthrough Controversies: Will Azerbaijani lands be free soon?

by LEILA ALIEVA

Turkish President Abdullah Gül (L) with his Armenian counterpart, Serzh Sarksyan (R), before their meeting in Turkey on Oct. 14. The Caucasus region is once more at the eve of events of historical significance — a century-old conflict between Armenia and Turkey may be coming to an end.

While leading politicians and the public in Europe and the US are watching events with excitement and judicious appraisal, the nearly 1 million Azerbaijani internally displaced persons (IDP) and refugees wonder with growing concern whether the chances for their right to return to their lands and homes will decrease with these much-praised developments.

The biggest controversy is developing around opening the Armenia-Turkey border, as there are opposing opinions as to whether it will have a positive or negative effect on the resolution of the major conflict in the region.

While Azerbaijan’s lack of economic relations with Armenia does not cause any questions, Turkey’s closure of its borders with Armenia, rightly perceiving the escalation of war in 1992-1993 as a threat to regional security, intentionally or unintentionally came as a counterbalance to Russian military involvement on the side of Armenia and sanctions of the US government, which denied any aid to the democratically elected government of Azerbaijan.

However, the absence of economic relations with Armenia has an even deeper meaning, which can be understood in the context of the root causes of post-Soviet conflicts. The Soviet centralized economy deprived the Caucasian republics of a sense of interdependency on each other. All ties and trade relations between the republics were mediated by Moscow through an authoritarian command system, which led to the republics’ underestimation of the degree of their dependence on each other. Armenia, for instance, was sure that regardless of the state of affairs with Azerbaijan, that nation would supply oil or gas to the republic, even at the expense of their own citizens, under pressure from Moscow.

In fact, this perception has developed in the post-Soviet era. Regardless of their occupation and ethnic cleansing of Nagorno-Karabakh and seven more regions of Azerbaijan, Armenia was sure that there always would be Moscow, Brussels or Washington to pressure Azerbaijan to restore economic relations without reciprocal acts of compromise by Yerevan. In this sense, Turkey’s act of closing its borders was an important signal to Armenia: one cannot enjoy the fruits of cooperation with neighbors without respect for their borders and sovereignty.

A great deal of aid from the US since 1991 and significant aid from Europe, along with remittances and investments from the diaspora, has somewhat neutralized the effect of the absence of trade with its neighbors and fed into Armenia’s feeling that it is possible to survive without regulating relations with its neighbors.

And the last meaning of the closed borders is that although it bears a character of sanctions it is an alternative to a military way of resolving the conflict. Thus, the opening of the borders by Turkey may weaken the effect of the trade sanctions as a peaceful regulator of international relations by narrowing the space for non-military conflict resolution and increasing the chances of a forceful confrontation seeking the return of the lands.

The Nagorno-Karabakh conflict broke out in the course of the collapse of the Soviet Union, the first conflict to create deep divisions in the region and prevent South Caucasus states from uniting, unlike the Baltic states. After the open and bloody war which marked the beginning of the two states’ independence, the conflict reached its long-standing stalemate, which froze developments in the region in terms of security, politics and economics.

Since then, the South Caucasus knot has represented a complex mixture of local, regional and international interests, where the most pressing issue of the primary victims of the conflict — those displaced and deported — has been largely left behind the scenes of political intrigue.

Conflict overshadowed by rapproachment

The issue of ongoing conflict between Armenia and Azerbaijan somehow became overshadowed by the resolution of historically tense Armenian-Turkish relations, mainly because the latter was on the agenda of more powerful actors and thus seemed easier to resolve.

The ongoing processes in the region create an impression that for Europe, the issue of how Turkey addresses its past and its Christian neighbor has been more important than the fact of Armenia’s present occupation of Nagorno-Karabakh and seven more regions of the other neighboring state. Indeed, while an open intervention by Russia in Georgia caused immediate reactions from the European Union, followed by the dispatch of a monitoring group and intense negotiations with Russia at the highest level of the EU, the resolution of the Karabakh conflict was given to the framework of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE), the mechanism of which contributed to the “frozenness” of the status quo, where military advances by one party (Armenia) in violation of the state border of Azerbaijan are used as a bargaining tool in negotiations. This created a precedent, which probably inspired Russia 14 years later to move into the territory of another Caucasus state.

The secrecy of the Armenian-Turkish bilateral negotiations was the one of the causes of reservations related to the generally positive assessment of this process, which may, according to the promoters of this rapprochement, create a favorable environment for the resolution of the Karabakh conflict. But the opposite is also true: it may not necessarily lead to the quick resolution of the conflict if it legitimizes selective recognition by Armenia of its neighbors’ borders, weakens the effect on the economy and makes the party violating borders more intransigent.

Moreover, if the Armenian-Turkish rapprochement, which contains an important provision on border recognition, remains without similar recognition in the other case — the recognition of Azerbaijan’s borders by Armenia — it looks as if one party — Turkey — is resolving its historical issues with Armenia at Azerbaijan’s expense.

In this political context, the recently observed tensions in Azerbaijani-Turkish relations would look quite natural, if not the extreme form of its expression and the fact that it took place at the level of state actors. The incident with the national flags could signal an emotionally charged popular reaction, if not the unanimously expressed opinion of 40 prominent public leaders in Azerbaijan who in a recently issued statement announced that they found it unacceptable that the flags had been removed from monuments, Turkish enterprises and educational institutions in Baku and noted that “the people of Turkey can be sure that nothing and nobody can spoil our brotherly relations.”

This confirms a major flaw in the international approach to resolving conflicts in the region, where the public plays very little role, if at all, in the “big deals” between the actors in the region.

The positive event — the signing of the Armenian-Turkish protocols — initiated from above rather than from below, besides lacking the specific vision of its implication for the major regional conflict, may have little influence in geopolitical terms on long-term stability and its short-term humanitarian implications. This is even more so if the interests of the primary victims of the current situation — refugees and IDPs from the occupied territories and other victims of the conflict — are not viewed as the most pressing issue today.

In this regard, the uncertain outcome of the resolution of the Karabakh conflict and the long awaited Turkish-Armenian rapprochement comes at too high a cost for those who have been suffering from the present, not the past, conflict.

Leila Alieva started her lecture with concept of “integration into Europe” and talked about various interpretations put behind these words. The lecture brought some light into various stereotypes and conflicting points as well as touched upon problems, obstacles and challenges Azerbaijan faces while tries to integrate into Europe.

Why Azerbaijan should integrate into Europe? Integration into Europe – what will it bring to us? When and how can Azerbaijan integrate into Europe? Does Europe wants our integration? Leila Alieva helped to answer these and similar questions during her lecture.

Also during the lecture, another interesting point surfaced – does Azerbaijan have any alternatives to eurointegration? Students analyzed these alternatives and compared them to eurointegration in the balances of logic.

At the end of the lecture, Leila Alieva gave distriputed signed copies of her recent book about Azerbaijan Democratic Republic.

Original news.

Historians, politicians and representatives of civil society discussed Azerbaijan’s democratic past and the heritage of its first republic.

On 2 October, Center for National and International Studies (CNIS) organized a conference titled “Democratic Values in the History of Azerbaijan.” Attended by several prominent Azeri historians and politicians, as well as the representatives of civil society and youth groups, the conference held discussions around Azerbaijan Democratic Republic (1918-1920), its short experience of democracy-building and its heritage. Conference participants gave their interpretations about Azerbaijan’s first democratic republic’s legacies in the lights of today’s events. Discussions touched upon not only the role and policies of ADR, but also its implications for modern days and its comparison with the political system established in Azerbaijan now.

In 2008-2009, CNIS has held eight similar conferences on the occasion of the 90th anniversary of the ADR in various regions of Azerbaijan. The main purpose of this project (project manager Leyla Aliyeva and project coordinator Aydin Balayev) was to research and discuss democratic traditions and values throughout Azerbaijani history.

The conferences that were held looked into the traditions of parliamentarianism in Azerbaijan (Sheki), the problems of Azerbaijan’s integration into Europe (Ganja), oil revenues and their mutual link with  reforms being implemented in the country (Salyan), the traditions and problems of Azerbaijani journalism (Shirvan), agrarian reforms (Quba), gender issues (Masalli), local government (Barda) and independent courts (Balakan). Several participants of these conferences were also present at final event in Baku.

During the last conference held in Baku, a special edition of CNIS containing minutes of all the previous conferences were presented to guests and participants.

The project was supported by the National Endowment for Democracy.

Watch her speech in full below.

Background

Closed seas play very diverse roles in relations between their bordering states: they unite and separate. They are places of transit, a shared –sometimes disputed- space, an element of joint identity, a common heritage.

Sub-regions provide an additional arena for the European Union to interact with its closest neighbours, where sub-regional cooperation, i.e. , international cooperation between states (and sub-state governments) in geographical groups which are smaller than a continent, provides a valuable complement to the EU’s foreign policy aim of peace, stability and prosperity.

The EU relations with its neighbourhood are an issue linked to the debates about the role of the EU as a global actor: model of governance, promoter of multilateralism, normative power or, even security power and the nature of its activities.

Objective

The Main goal of the EU4SEAS project is to conduct a comprehensive analysis of the sub-regional multilateralism (notion and practice) in the four maritime basins (Mediterranean, Baltic, Black and Caspian Seas) as a specific approach for the EU in handling relations with those spaces. EU4SEAS will examine the development of sub-regional cooperation in its specific contexts as well as the EU’s impact on it.

To learn more, please visit project website at www.eu4seas.eu

It details the proceedings of eight round tables which the Centre for National and International Studies completed in 2008-2009 in the regions of Azerbaijan.These conferences were conducted in Sheki, Ganja, Salyan, Shirvan, Guba, Masalli, Balakan and Barda in connection with the 90th anniversary of the first democratic republic of Azerbaijan – the Azerbaijan Democratic Republic – of 1918-1920.

Due to some technical problems with recording, some parts of these conferences have not made it into this publication, but it still covers nearly all the important presentations and debates.

The book was published with the support of National Endowment for Democracy (USA)

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Azeri version (3 MB)
English version (10 MB)