Baku Fumes Over Bryza, Russian Church Steps Into the Fray

Plus, Bulgaria’s spy-diplomats win the latest round against the government and Tymoshenko’s husband gets asylum in the Czech Republic.

by Barbara Frye, Ioana Caloianu, Varvara.Lokteva, and Kelly Klein 9 January 2012

1. Frustration, anger in Baku after envoy returns to Washington

 

The return home of Matthew Bryza, Washington’s ambassador to Azerbaijan, has left some in Baku fuming, EurasiaNet reports.

 

Bryza packed up in December after having failed to win Senate confirmation for a year after his recess appointment by President Barack Obama in 2010. Senators Barbara Boxer of California and Robert Menendez of New Jersey, both members of the Foreign Relations Committee, refused to vote to confirm him.

 

Armenian diaspora groups in the United States objected to Bryza’s appointment, arguing that he was overly friendly toward Azerbaijani and Turkish interests. Bryza was the U.S. envoy in the peace talks between Azerbaijan and Armenia over Nagorno-Karabakh, an Armenian-held enclave within the territory of Azerbaijan.

 

EurasiaNet quotes a letter to Obama and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton from a group of civil society activists and journalists in Baku, who said “the botched Bryza vote ‘does not serve to refute’ the impression among many Azerbaijanis that the longtime Karabakh talks have failed because of the influence of Armenian Diaspora lobbyists in such mediator countries as the United States and France.”

 

Bryza, 46, is well-respected in diplomatic circles. In December, 36 foreign policy experts, including former State Department and national security officials, wrote to the leadership of the Senate and the Senate’s Foreign Relations Committee urging his confirmation.

 

2. Protest leader, clergy see role for Russian church as mediator

 

A leader of the Russian protest movement has called on the Orthodox Church to help ease tension between demonstrators and the government.

 

“I want the Russian Orthodox Church to have the specific position in society where all conflicting parties look for and accept its intermediation,” Aleksei Navalny, a prominent anti-corruption blogger, told novelist Boris Akunin in an interview for Akunin’s blog on the website of the Eko Moskvy radio station.

 

The church is signaling it could be willing to take on such a role. Archpriest Vsevolod Chaplin, an official with the Moscow Patriarchate, is calling for “a serious dialogue about the basic political and economic structures of the country, including the role and status of the Russian people,” Interfax reports.

 

Chaplin said the country’s politics can never go back “to business as usual, to the political silence of the past decade,” and that it is important for the church to help the opposing sides find a common language. 

 

In his Christmas speech, Patriarch Kirill, the head of the Russian church, also called for the authorities and the Russian people to start a dialogue.

 

 

3. Sofia will appeal court decision that allows spy-diplomats to stay in posts

 

The fate of a handful, and possibly dozens, of Bulgarian diplomats took a twist in the past few days as officials with the country’s Foreign Ministry said they would appeal a court decision allowing the envoys to stay on the job, according to the Sofia Echo.

 

 

The diplomats were called home over the summer as fallout from a report that said they had collaborated with the communist-era secret police. Foreign Minster Nikolay Mladenov brought them back to Sofia on a “working trip” that would last until the end of Socialist President Georgi Parvanov’s term. (Parvanov, who himself was earlier revealed to have cooperated with the secret police, had refused to recall them, calling the move “a political purge.”)

 

But a panel of the country’s Supreme Administrative Court said the diplomats’ recall had been illegal. The Echo cites various sources as saying that Mladenov and his deputy, Konstantin Dimitrov, will appeal the decision.

 

Parvanov’s successor, President-elect Rossen Plevneliev, is an ally of the government and has promised to recall the ambassadors after he is sworn into office 21 January.

 

"And even if they use all kinds of legal tricks and different circles of influence, I am adamant that they will not be the face of our country,” Mladenov reportedly told the Monitor newspaper. "The truth is that these people are just trying to maintain their privileges and allowances."

 

4. Prague grants asylum to Tymoshenko’s husband

 

Oleksandr Tymoshenko, husband of former Ukraine Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko, has been granted political asylum in the Czech Republic, Czech Position reports.

 

The decision was announced at a 6 January press conference by Czech Interior Minister Jan Kubice, who declined to comment further.

 

Citing a statement from Yulia Tymoshenko's Fatherland party, The Independent said “her husband sought asylum as he was being unfairly targeted by a criminal probe into her business activities when she owned Ukraine's main energy firm” in the 1990s.

 

The party's website accuses President Viktor Yanukovych of “using the dirtiest methods: [attempting] to get Yulia Tymoshenko by pressuring members of her family. The decision to apply for asylum was from a desire to deprive the regime of additional levers of pressure on the leader of the party.”

 

Tymoshenko has been serving a seven-year sentence for abuse of power and corruption since her August conviction following a trial deemed illegitimate by Brussels. Her deteriorating health has been a cause of concern. She was moved in December from the Kyiv detention facility to a penal colony in the Kharkiv oblast, according to her own website.

 

5. Tajikistan and Uzbekistan hike rail tariffs in ongoing rift

 

A spat over rail cargo between Tajikistan and Uzbekistan has escalated, according to Radio Free Europe. Dushanbe says it has raised tariffs on Uzbek goods carried across its territory in response to a similar hike by Tashkent that took effect this month. Usmon Qalandarov, deputy director of the Tajik State Railroad Company, told RFE his country had been handed an average 32 percent tariff increase for cargo it sent through Uzbekistan.

 

Exacerbating the problem, a railway bridge in Uzbekistan that was damaged in a November explosion has still not been repaired. Qalandarov said 300 packed freight cars bound for Tajikistan remain stranded on the other side of the bridge.

 

Many experts believe the real reason behind the conflict is construction of the controversial Rogun Dam in Tajikistan, which Uzbekistan argues would imperil irrigation of its crucial cotton fields downstream.

 

The Uzbek government has blamed terrorists for the November blast, but a reporter for EurasiaNet who visited the site cast doubt on that account: “The access road alongside the railway is sealed off at one end by a military barracks and a permanent police checkpoint, and at the other end by the Uzbek-Tajik frontier. Outsiders are not welcome. The only way for a foreigner to visit was to circumvent the security controls with the help of a convincing cover story.”

 

Instead, EurasiaNet writes, “Uzbekistan may have sabotaged its own railway in a twisted attempt to economically punish Tajikistan.”