Liz Fuller writes the Caucasus Report blog for RFE/RL.
The Armenian government's decision to send noncombat personnel to serve with the international peacekeeping force in Iraq has met with resistance from civic groups, opposition parties, one member of the three-party ruling coalition, and some senior military officers.
Georgian President Saakashvili (file photo) Addressing the UN General Assembly on 21 September, Mikheil Saakashvili outlined a three-stage plan for resolving Tbilisi's conflicts with the breakaway republics of Abkhazia and South Ossetia by exclusively peaceful means, RFE/RL's UN correspondent reported.
13 September 2004 -- NATO's Cooperative Best Effort-2004 exercises, scheduled to take place on 14-27 September in Azerbaijan, have been canceled, according to a NATO press release of 13 September.
Initial reports on 1 and 2 September that the militants who seized over 1,000 hostages in the North Ossetian town of Beslan included Chechens and Ingush immediately sparked concern that the incident could trigger major clashes between the Ossetians and Ingush. While reports of Ossetian reprisals against Ingush in North Ossetia have so far proven false, both ethnic groups fear that tensions could erupt into violence at any time.
Ilham Aliyev Ten months after the disputed ballot that formalized his succession to the presidency, Ilham Aliyev has appealed to Azerbaijan's opposition parties to embark on a dialogue aimed at national reconciliation, zerkalo.az reported on 4 September. Leading members of at least three opposition parties, however, have reacted with caution and skepticism, arguing that the president should take specific actions to demonstrate his good faith.
[For more on the North Ossetian hostage tragedy and the recent wave of terrorism in Russia, see RFE/RL's "Terror in Russia" --> http://www.rferl.org/specials/russia-terror/ page.]
With no end to the hostage taking at a school in North Ossetia in sight, it is already clear that the incident is a landmark in Moscow's ongoing struggle to preserve its control over the North Caucasus using force under the guise of combatting "international terrorism." In hindsight, the hostage taking may in a few years be seen as a turning point that led to Moscow's defeat in that battle.
More than 10 hours after a group of some 17 armed militants seized a school in the town of Beslan in the Republic of North Ossetia on the morning of 1 September, the identities of the militants and their aims remained unclear. The militants were still holding hostage some 120 students, along with parents and teachers; at least eight people were reported to have died from injuries received during the initial onslaught, although reports of casualty figures varied.
On 29 August, Chechen voters will go to the polls for the second time within 11 months to endorse or reject the candidate perceived by the Kremlin as most capable of imposing some semblance of normality in the war-torn region. Moscow's initial choice to head the republic, former mufti Akhmad-hadji Kadyrov, who was originally installed as pro-Moscow leader in June 2000, was killed on 9 May by a terrorist bomb which experts believe could only have been planted by a traitor within Kadyrov's entourage.
It is less than three months since Russian oligarch Kakha Bendukidze accepted the post of Georgia's economy minister, and he has already crossed swords with colleagues, including Finance Minister Zurab Nogaideli, and incurred the hostility of much of the population.
One of Daghestan's most powerful regional leaders, Khasavyurt Mayor Saygidpasha Umakhanov, has publicly accused Daghestan State Council Chairman Magomedali Magomedov of murder and demanded that he resign. That accusation effectively marks the start of the campaign for the June 2006 republican presidential election, in which Magomedov, who is 74 and has headed the republic since 1991, is barred by the constitution from seeking a further term.
Azerbaijani President Aliyev Over the past two weeks, one former and two current top Azerbaijani officials have again affirmed their collective rejection of international mediators' insistence that the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict can be resolved only on the basis of mutual concessions. Whether those Azerbaijani statements were intended primarily for domestic consumption, or whether and to what extent they should be construed as warnings to the international community not to pressure Azerbaijan too forcefully to agree to concessions that might trigger a major public backlash, is as yet unclear. Meanwhile, two senior U.S. diplomats have made clear that Washington continues to hope for a swift resolution of the conflict.
Malik Saidullaev (file photo) The refusal last week by the Chechen Central Election Commission to register Moscow-based businessman Malik Saidullaev as a candidate for the 29 August ballot to elect a successor to slain pro-Moscow leader Akhmed-hadji Kadyrov removes the last doubts as to the outcome of that ballot -- assuming that the Kremlin's apparent choice, Chechen Interior Minister Major General Alu Alkhanov, is not assassinated in the next four weeks. Kremlin-sponsored opinion polls summarized by Interfax on 19 July suggested that 45.1 percent of respondents would vote for Alkhanov and 25.3 percent for Saidullaev. That outcome would have necessitated a runoff, a possibility that Chechen Central Election Commission Chairman Abdul-Kerim Arsakhanov mentioned in an interview with Interfax on 26 May.
On 19 July, the independent ingushetiya.ru website published an update by B. Bagaudinov on the ongoing investigation into the 21-22 June raids on Interior Ministry facilities in Ingushetia that left almost 90 people dead. Four days earlier, on 15 July, Russian Prosecutor-General Vladimir Ustinov gave the number of suspects arrested in connections with those coordinated attacks as approximately 30, of whom 20 have been formally charged. Bagaudinov failed to cite the source of his information, which seems plausible, however.
In the run-up to the 29 August ballot to elect a successor to slain pro-Moscow Chechen leader Akhmed-hadji Kadyrov, the Russian leadership is apparently seeking to undercut the authority of Kadyrov's son, Ramzan, by either abolishing the "presidential guard" he commands or subsuming some of its members into a new crack Interior Ministry regiment. But a Chechen spokesman, Muslim Khuchiev, told Interfax on 22 July that the presidential guard will continue to exist despite the creation of the new regiment.
At Moscow's instigation, the six CIS states that are members of the CIS Collective Security Treaty Organization (Russia, Armenia, Belarus, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, and Tajikistan), together with Moldova, Ukraine, and Uzbekistan, issued a statement in Vienna on 8 July harshly criticizing the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) and calling for a fundamental refocusing of its priorities and activities.
On 21 June, the foreign ministers of Armenia and Azerbaijan and the French, Russian, and U.S. co-chairmen of the OSCE Minsk Group met for the third time in 10 weeks to discuss approaches to resolving the Karabakh conflict.
Local commentators are virtually unanimous in their conclusion that this week's guerrilla raids on strategic targets in Ingushetia in which around 90 people were killed were the deliberate response to the Kremlin's policy.
Observers in Baku are unanimous in their conviction that rivalries within the Azerbaijani leadership are becoming more acrimonious and more visible. What remains unclear is whether and how President Ilham Aliyev is planning to take advantage of that infighting to strengthen his own position. One of the warring camps is, moreover, already seeking to portray itself as the pro-democracy faction and thus as Aliyev's natural partner in his professed campaign to secure for Azerbaijan membership of NATO and the EU.
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