[R-G] Energy at Root of Karabakh Accord + Azerbaijan to End VOA, Other Foreign Broadcasts on Local Radio

[Yoshie Furuhashi]

<http://www.moscowtimes.ru/article/1010/42/372121.htm>
Energy at Root of Karabakh Accord
05 November 2008By Nikolaus von Twickel / Staff Writer

The presidents of Armenia and Azerbaijan have signed a declaration on
the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict at a meeting with President Dmitry
Medvedev in a sign of the Kremlin's growing role and the importance of
energy politics in the South Caucasus.

Armenian President Serzh Sargsyan and Azeri President Ilham Aliyev
signed the largely symbolic document at Medvedev's Maiendorf
residence, just outside Moscow on Saturday.

Armenia has traditionally been a staunch ally of Russia, while
energy-rich Azerbaijan has maintained friendly ties with Georgia, but
Moscow has been looking for greater cooperation with Azerbaijan on
energy issues.

The five-point document, published on the Kremlin's web site, says
both countries will step up efforts to find a peaceful solution over
Nagorno-Karabakh, an ethnic Armenian enclave inside Azerbaijan that
broke away after a bloody conflict in the early 1990s that killed more
than 30,000 and displaced more than 1 million.

The declaration is the first such document signed by the heads of the
two states since Russia mediated a cease-fire agreement in 1994.

While it stresses the need for a political settlement based on
international law, the document does not contain any significant
commitments, such as to forego the use of force, nor does it mention
the conflicting issues at the heart of the conflict, territorial
integrity and national self-determination.

The outcome of the meeting was not as significant as some may have hoped.

"This was not much different than dozens of meetings before," Svante
Cornell, research director at the Central Asia-Caucasus Institute, a
joint U.S.-Swedish think tank, said Tuesday by telephone from Tbilisi,
Georgia. "All we have seen is basically two leaders committing
themselves to solving the conflict."

Alexei Malashenko, an analyst with the Moscow Carnegie Center, said
the declaration was largely ceremonial.

"The fact that Medvedev [presided over the talks) just means that both
sides accept Russia as mediator," Malashenko said Tuesday. "Russia
needed an urgent rehabilitation as peacekeeper in the region."

Moscow's relations with the West worsened dramatically after it sent
soldiers and tanks deep into Georgia to repel a Georgian military
attack to reclaim its breakaway region of South Ossetia in August.

The declaration also says negotiations should continue within the
framework of the so-called Minsk Group, a 12-member body headed
jointly by Russia, France and the United States, and overseen by the
Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe.

U.S. Deputy Assistant Secretary of State Matthew Bryza and French
Ambassador Bernard Fassier were at Maiendorf, an OSCE spokesman said
by telephone from Vienna.

Bryza, the senior U.S. diplomat overseeing the South Caucasus region,
praised the result.

"My country fully supports this document. The declaration shows that
both presidents can work seriously towards solving this conflict," he
said, Interfax reported Monday.

Cornell said the declaration was a show of force by the Kremlin
capitalizing on the weakness of the West, as the Georgian war in
August, the global financial crisis and the leadership change in the
United States would all work to cripple Western influence in the
region.

"There is a new geopolitical situation now," he said.

Russia, he said, was offering a solution that would mean a loss of
independence for Azerbaijan, possibly through the deployment of a
Moscow-sponsored peacekeeping force on its territory.

Cornell said Moscow was probably eyeing a "common state" solution,
something that had been on the negotiating table back in the 1990s.

This proposal, which had been rejected by Baku, focuses on bringing
Azerbaijan and Nagorno-Karabakh together in a confederation.

Carnegie's Malashenko said that while its influence in the region has
grown, Russia would not go it alone.

"To solve this conflict, you need more than one mediator; you need a
group of mediators," he said. "Moscow won't act outside the format of
the Minsk Group."

Malashenko also denied that the talks might herald a weakening of
Moscow's traditional support for Armenia.

"I cannot imagine that one country will give one-sided support to one
party, because this is impossible," he said.

Both Azerbaijan and Armenia depend on trade routes through Georgia.

Moscow has recently been courting Azerbaijan, which wants to sell more
gas to Russia.

Medvedev signed a cooperation agreement with Aliyev in Baku in July,
and in Moscow this September both leaders discussed direct talks
between Azerbaijan and Armenia over Nagorno-Karabakh.

Europe has also been making overtures to Azerbaijan as a vital
supplier to a proposed new gas pipeline, which would reduce Western
dependence on Russian energy.

The Nabucco pipeline project has been backed both by the European
Union and the United States.

EU Energy Commissioner Andris Piebalgs will travel to Turkey and
Azerbaijan this Wednesday to show Europe's commitment to the project,
The Associated Press reported.

Moscow has worried the EU by negotiating with Turkmenistan and
Kazakhstan to commit to sending their Caspian Sea gas through Russia.

It is also pushing South Stream, a rival pipeline project by
state-controlled Gazprom, which is slated to cost some $13 billion.

<http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/11/04/europe/letter.php>
On energy, Azeris play Europe and Russia against the middle
By Celestine Bohlen
Bloomberg News
Tuesday, November 4, 2008

BAKU, Azerbaijan: It is boom time in Baku, the capital of Azerbaijan:
the skyline is dense with cranes and high-rise buildings, and the
streets of the port city on the Caspian Sea are clogged with luxury
shops and traffic.

Oil revenue has fueled the country's growth, and even as prices have
plummeted, Azerbaijan's energy resources remain a valuable prize.
Evidence of this is the tug-of-war between Russia and Europe over
natural gas from the next phase of a project that's expected to at
least double current production when it moves from the planning stage
to completion.

The competition is testing the former Soviet republic's ability to
maintain its political balance in the months since Russia's invasion
of Georgia heightened tensions between East and West.

"As always, Azerbaijan is trying to find common ground with all
sides," said Fariz Ismailzade, director of the Advanced Foreign
Service Program at the Azerbaijan Diplomatic Academy in Baku.

Over the past two months, Russia and the United States, acting with
the Europeans, have stepped up their attentions to this mostly Muslim
nation of 8.5 million people. In addition to selling its gas,
Azerbaijan wants to parlay the international interest into the
resolution of its conflict over the separatist region of
Nagorno-Karabakh, occupied by Armenians since a bloody ethnic war
ended in 1994.

It inched toward that goal in a meeting on Nov. 2, where the two sides
agreed to resolve the dispute under Russian, U.S. and French
mediation, easing tensions in the South Caucasus after two Azerbaijani
oil-export routes were disrupted by the Georgian war.

"This is our neighborhood, and everything that happens here worries
us," says Novruz Mammadov, head of President Ilham Aliyev's
foreign-policy department.

Given its strategic location between the Caspian and Black seas,
Azerbaijan is used to being in the middle. Since becoming independent
in 1991, it has sought to minimize reliance on Soviet-era pipelines
that go through Russia, a major trading partner and home to two
million Azeris. At the same time, it has maintained neighborly
relations.

"We have a strategic partnership with Russia and with the U.S., and we
don't see any contradiction," said Khazar Ibrahim, spokesman for the
Azerbaijani Foreign Ministry.

Vice President Dick Cheney visited Baku in September, followed a month
later by the U.S. deputy secretary of state, John Negroponte. In
between, Aliyev, 46, was invited to Moscow for a one-day visit with
President Dmitry Medvedev of Russia. The European Union's energy
commissioner, Andris Piebalgs, is due in Baku this month.

One topic of discussion is the natural-gas field Shah Deniz II, with
reserves estimated to at least equal the nine billion cubic meters, or
318 billion cubic feet, produced by the project's first phase. That
gas is now sold at home and to Turkey and Georgia.

Once the second phase is developed, the Moscow-based Gazprom OAO,
which holds a monopoly on Russian exports, wants to buy the gas to
bolster reserves for future contractual commitments. The United States
and the European Union want the new supplies sent directly to Europe
through the proposed Nabucco pipeline, an $8 billion venture at the
center of the region's efforts to reduce dependence on Russia.

Diversification of sources and routes has been a European priority
since January 2006, when Russia, which accounts for 25 percent of EU
gas imports, briefly halted shipments over a price dispute with
Ukraine, a transit country.

Azerbaijan has yet to decide when it will develop Shah Deniz II and
says it is waiting for the Europeans to make an offer. Azerbaijan can
bide its time, Mammadov said.

"We have said no to the Russians, for now," he said. "To the
Europeans, we have said we are ready to be good partners: for oil, for
gas, for transit; but they need this, not us."

In trying to strike a balance between East and West, Aliyev is
following in the footsteps of his father, whom he succeeded as
president in 2003. Heydar Aliyev, a former KGB general, played a key
role in securing one link with Europe that bypasses Russia: a $4
billion pipeline that, by 2005, was carrying Azerbaijani oil from the
Caspian region through Georgia to Turkey's Mediterranean coast.

Operated by the London-based BP, Europe's second-largest oil company,
the pipeline now exports a million barrels of oil a day on average -
roughly 1 percent of the world's supply.

The International Monetary Fund predicts Azerbaijan's gross domestic
product will total $53.2 billion this year, compared with $8.6 billion
in 2004.

Revenue will probably shrink in 2009 as declining economic growth
worldwide slows demand for crude oil. Prices had fallen by 56 percent
to about $65 a barrel Nov. 3 from a record $147.27 on July 11.

For now, though, the signs of oil wealth are everywhere in Baku. In
its old city, tycoons have rebuilt modern villas on narrow, winding
streets in the style of the mansions of their 19th-century
predecessors. Oil has always been key to the fortunes of Baku: Marco
Polo spotted a gusher here in the 14th century. In the 1800s, it drew
European families, including the Rothschilds and the Nobels, who
rushed to profit from the region's hydrocarbons.

Still, the dangers to Azerbaijan's thriving energy business from
festering conflicts are all too evident. On Aug. 5, the BP pipeline
was temporarily closed after an explosion on its Turkish portion,
allegedly the work of Kurdish terrorists. That was followed by the
closing of two oil-transit routes that cross Georgia because of its
five-day war with Russia over the separatist region of South Ossetia.

Azerbaijan has been able to leverage some of the interest in its
energy resources to try to end its own "frozen conflict" over
Nagorno-Karabakh, which has cost it 20 percent of its territory.
Medvedev arranged the Nov. 2 meeting in Moscow at which Aliyev and the
Armenian president, Serzh Sargsyan, agreed to seek a resolution -
signaling Russia's willingness to play mediator in this dispute.

"We have to find a way to have a peaceful, stable region," Ibrahim said.

<http://www.voanews.com/english/2008-10-31-voa54.cfm>
Azerbaijan to End VOA, Other Foreign Broadcasts on Local Radio
By VOA News
31 October 2008
	
Authorities in Azerbaijan say they plan to halt local broadcasts by
foreign stations by the end of the year.

The chairman of Azerbaijan's National Television and Radio Council,
Nushiravan Maharramli, says his country is not interested in granting
local frequencies to foreign broadcasters. He says the change will
affect the BBC, the British Broadcasting Corporation, U.S. financed
Voice of America and Radio Liberty.

The official says his country has been gradually implementing changes,
having previously eliminated broadcasts by Russian, French and Turkish
stations.

The U.S. Broadcasting Board of Governors, the federal agency
responsible for all U.S. government-supported, non-military
international broadcasting, says it strongly objects to the proposal.
A BBG Board Member, Steven J. Simmons, says the decision follows a
"disturbing pattern" that began with harsh restrictions on private
broadcasters within Azerbaijan two years ago and now directly impacts
international media.

A spokesman for the U.S. embassy in Baku, Terry Davidson, says it will
be seeking clarification of the issue from the Azerbaijani government.
He said in Azerbaijan, foreign broadcasters such as the Voice of
America, the BBC and Radio Liberty have contributed greatly to
enriching the space for public debate and understanding.

Some information for this report was provided by AFP.