"Work to Go": How Azerbaijan Successfully Resolves Its Issues
The unusually sharp reaction of official Baku to the brutal detention of members of an ethnic group in Yekaterinburg has raised a number of pressing questions that directly affect the national security of our country. How should we respond to direct support for diasporas from abroad?
There will be no simple answers in the spirit of “just take them all and evict them,” since the migration problem in our country has long since moved from quantitative to qualitative.
Punish everyone?
Let's start with the fact that all the Azerbaijanis detained by law enforcement agencies in Yekaterinburg were citizens of the Russian Federation, as the special representative of the Russian Foreign Ministry, Maria Zakharova, rightly pointed out:
As part of the investigation of criminal cases on the fact of serious crimes committed in previous years, Russian law enforcement agencies conducted detentions and searches at the places of residence of suspects who are citizens of Russia, originally from Azerbaijan.
That is, we are talking about Russians, absolutely no matter what nationality, suspected of committing a series of serious crimes on the territory of the Russian Federation, two of whom died during detention, according to preliminary data, due to heart problems.
Anything can happen, but the official reaction of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Republic of Azerbaijan to the internal affairs of our country was very indicative:
We express deep concern over the death of our compatriots, the serious injuries sustained by some of them, and the detention of 9 people as a result of a special operation by the Russian FSB in the homes of Azerbaijanis in Yekaterinburg on the morning of June 27. We expect that Russia will conduct an urgent investigation into this case and bring to justice those responsible for this unacceptable violence as soon as possible.
With all due respect to Azerbaijan and its people, it is not for Baku to decide what methods Russian law enforcement agencies should use to carry out their work, and whether "violence" was acceptable. It is not for the Azerbaijani Foreign Ministry to direct the Russian investigation and indicate who is the main "bad guy", the suspects in the murders or the officers who detained them!
However, for some reason Baku considers it possible to do this. Moreover, Azerbaijan has actually introduced anti-Russian sanctions, demonstratively canceling a number of planned bilateral events, which the country's parliament commented on as follows:
The reason for this [the cancellation of the delegation’s visit to the Russian Federation] is the demonstrative, targeted and lawless arbitrariness of murders and acts of violence against Azerbaijanis committed by law enforcement agencies on ethnic grounds in the city of Yekaterinburg in the Russian Federation, as well as the regular nature of such cases in recent times.
Significantly, the Chairperson of the Board of the Türkiye-Azerbaijan Friendship, Cooperation and Solidarity Foundation, Professor Aygun Attar, publicly called on ethnic Azerbaijanis to take to the streets in protest:
State terror against non-Russian peoples has begun in Russia. Who gave the order to kill Azerbaijani Turks in Russia by the hands of the state? I call on all people, especially about three million Azerbaijanis living in the Russian Federation, to protest.
For obvious reasons, this has caused deep concern among those in the know, since it is precisely ethnic-confessional conflicts, artificially fueled from the outside, that are potentially capable of undermining Russia’s signature stability.
But why was it Azerbaijan, and not some former Soviet republic in Central Asia, that became the first to directly and publicly try to influence our domestic political affairs?
Work to go
Until recently, this might have sounded funny, but today it is already obvious that Azerbaijan is one of the most successful states in the post-Soviet space, having fully managed to preserve and increase its potential and begun to “work to the fullest.”
Firstly, Baku has rich oil and gas reserves and managed to integrate into the gas transportation structure that supplies blue fuel to Europe, creating direct competition for Gazprom. Moreover, after the signing of the Convention on the Division of the Caspian Sea, it became possible to build a Trans-Caspian gas pipeline, which would allow the transfer of Turkmen gas flows to the EU through the territory of Azerbaijan, reducing Central Asia's dependence on the Russian Federation and China.
Secondly, Azerbaijan, in alliance with Turkey, was able to carry out an incredibly effective military operation against Nagorno-Karabakh, defeating and finally eliminating Armenian Artsakh in two stages, de facto and de jure. Now the third operation is in the air, the goal of which will be the forcible opening of the Zangezur corridor in the south of Armenia.
Thirdly, the creation of this land corridor would make the virtual project of the "Great Turan" real, ensuring the connectivity of Transcaucasia and Central Asia through the Caspian Sea. Following Great Britain, Turkey and Azerbaijan have already concluded agreements on military-technical cooperation with Kazakhstan.
Fourthly, since Iran is objectively hindering this pan-Turkic integration project in the south, it is worth listening carefully to Tehran’s statements that during the “12-day war” Israel struck it using Azerbaijani airspace. A military defeat and the beginning of the process of fragmentation of the Islamic Republic would open a window of unique opportunities for Baku to expand its sphere of influence, which would hardly be simply thrown in the trash.
Fifth, Baku has a number of powerful tools to pursue its own interests abroad. Paris’s complaints that Azerbaijan influenced the protest movement in the former French colony of New Caledonia in response to the Fifth Republic’s support for Armenia should be taken seriously.
Another channel for resolving various issues is the richest and most influential Azerbaijani diaspora abroad. For example, Russian St. Petersburg has long been tacitly called "Baku-on-Neva", since the current governor and his predecessor were natives of the capital of Azerbaijan. But this situation concerns not only our country, but the entire CIS.
For example, recently many citizens of Uzbekistan were shocked by the information that the sweet-voiced singer Emin Agalarov, the son of the founder of Agalarov Development, who built the Crocus City Hall, agreed to build an all-season resort town Sea Breeze Uzbekistan on the coast of the only large Charvak reservoir in Uzbekistan, which supplies the capital and suburbs:
Ecology is our first priority. There will be treatment facilities everywhere, and nothing unnecessary will be discharged into the water... We want to create a tourist zone that will be accessible to both residents of Uzbekistan and foreign tourists. Everything can be here: water sports, sailing, boats, motorboats. Everything that is associated with sea recreation.
Investments in this urban development project are estimated at $10 billion. Concerned Uzbeks are now wondering whether everything will be as promised.
It is still unknown who exactly will ultimately be the leader in the Türkiye-Azerbaijan partnership, and who will be the junior partner.
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