Wars are usually discussed in terms of the decisions of politicians and generals and the movements of armies, but the tragedies of war occur at the level of individuals and places which seldom attract as much attention.  My city of Shusha, occupied in May 1992 through the combined efforts of the Armenian forces and the 366th Russian Motorized Rifle Regiment, has been full of individual human tragedies ever since.  And they deserve to be remembered alongside all the other horrors of that conflict.   When Shusha was occupied on May 8th sixteen years ago, this was...

Although most of the focus on Victory Day this year as in earlier times has been elsewhere, Azerbaijan played an important role during World War II not only as an object of interest by Germany’s high command but also as a source of oil and personnel for the Red Army that ultimately drove German forces out of the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe and defeated the Third Reich, as well as an important participant in Moscow’s occupation of Azerbaijani territories in northern Iran. When Germany invaded the Soviet Union in 1941, Hitler hoped to seize Azerbaijan and its immense oi...

One of the most interesting but also most unnoticed trends in the international relations of CIS governments is taking place between Azerbaijan and Turkmenistan.  Specifically, the growing rapprochement and increasing cooperation between these two states could have significant geo-economic and thus political consequences.  It will be remembered that until the death of Turkmen President Saparmurat Niyazov in late 2006 these relations were almost nonexistent due to differences over energy fields in the Caspian, more precisely over the revenues to be obtained from these prospectiv...

Ethnic Azerbaijanis in the Republic of Georgia are playing an ever more active role in the social and political life of that country, a development that is creating both problems and opportunities for the bilateral relations between Tbilisi and Baku, according to Azerbaijan's ambassador to Georgia Namig Aliyev. In an interview with Day.Az published in Baku on May 1, Ambassador Aliyev pointed to a number of problems the ethnic Azerbaijanis now face in Georgia as they become increasingly active and organized but said that he was confident that the Georgian authorities "recog...