Tuesday, August 6 2013

 Turan-ArmInfo. Wayne Merry, Senior Fellow for Europe and Eurasia at the Washington, DC-based American Foreign Policy Council, whose name showed-up on Azerbaijani government's newly released "blacklist" of 335 foreigners who are banned from entering the country because they travelled to Nagorno-Karabakh, condemned Baku's latest move.

"Azerbaijan harms only itself with its "blacklist" of persons who have visited Karabakh," he told TURAN's Washington DC correspondent.
The proof is that, he argued, "Armenian officials - albeit privately - welcome this policy by Baku, and even laugh out loud because it does damage only to the Azerbaijani side."  

"An intelligent policy for Baku would be to invite to Azerbaijan, immediately, every person from a third country who visits Karabakh… Indeed, Baku should publicly demand that these people visit Azerbaijan to see the dispute from both sides and to meet with people displaced by the conflict," he added.
The current policy is self-defeating; in that the persons on the "blacklist" are prevented from an opportunity to see and hear the Azerbaijani perspective, even if they want to, the analyst believes. 

"This policy is, unfortunately, only one example of the increasing isolation and insular thinking, which marks policy in Baku, tendencies which are bad for Azerbaijan and dangerous for the region."  

Merry, who served for more than two decades at the State and Defense Departments, visited NK last year, and described his observations of the frozen conflict as "nearing melting point".
He frequently urged the international and regional players for several times after the trip to pay closer attention to the conflict warning of possible escalation in violence.
Seeing his name on the "blacklist" was surprising for many taking into consideration his opinion was quite close to Azerbaijan's officially claimed "interest" of bringing the international attention to the matter.

"As someone who has visited Azerbaijan many times over the past three decades, I regret that its authorities have seen fit to prevent me from visiting their country in the near future," he told TURAN.

"This is particularly strange as my published writings on the Karabakh dispute clearly exhibit no preference for the Armenian side," he emphasized.
However, as a sovereign state, the Republic of Azerbaijan "is entirely at liberty to conduct policies, which damage itself and contribute to Armenian efforts to portray Baku as the villain in the dispute."

Merry is widely published and is a frequent speaker in Washington circles on topics relating to Caucasus, the Balkans, Central Asia, European security and trans-Atlantic relations. 

Besides him, there are more than 35 Americans on the Foreign Ministry list, which was published last week, includes MPs, journalists, NGO representatives, academics, and others from a range of countries.

In the meantime, some claim they have never actually been to Karabakh… "I have not visited NK, but have been associated with some who have… They included my name because some of my colleagues opted have visited… Being as I have now been blacklisted, I should have gone to NK. As an American specialist on the Caucasus, I am obligated to be objective in my studies," Nicholas Wondra, who was among sixteen students of Johns Hopkins University's School of Advanced International Studies that recently spent ten days in Baku, Yerevan and part of them in Khankendi, told TURAN's Washington DC correspondent.