Recently we posted about Azerbaijan, Armenia’s eastern neighbor, and one that is not very neighborly at all. Armenia in fact has a difficult neighborhood to live in at the moment. Relationships with Georgia have been mostly positive since the break up of the USSR but things became more complicated because of the 2008 South Ossetia war. Azerbaijan to the east of Armenia has been opposed to Armenia since before the break up of the Soviet Union. Turkey, with whom relations have been all but severed over the Turkish refusal to recognize the genocide of Armenians by the Ottoman Empire between 1915-1923, flanks Armenia to the west. Armenia needs friends and allies desperately. Armenia has tried to please everyone, including Iran, Russia and the West. This balancing act of complementarism is nothing new and dates back to the ancient Roman-Parthian feuds where an Armenian king could be deposed or worse if he didn’t manage to please both sides. But, this balancing act has often created inner turmoil with some citizens as being more pro-Iran, others more Russian centric, and others have more of a western leaning stance.
Recently there was a bit of a row over the American ambassador to Azerbaijan. Matthew Bryza had been appointed to the ambassador post to Azerbaijan in 2010 by President Obama in spite of warnings from Democratic senators Barbra Boxer and Robert Menendez that they couldn’t in good conscience do anything but block the nomination of Bryza. So Bryza went for the year as ambassador to Azerbaijan but was forced to come home when his one-year expired because the Senate refused to confirm his appointment (an ambassador can spend a year abroad on executive order, but needs senate confirmation to stay in a more permanent state). In spite of intense lobbying of Senators Boxer and Menendez by President Obama, the Azerbaijani interest groups in Washington DC and media outlets in America aiming lobs at the two senators, notably the Wall Street Journal and Washington Post. Yet Bryza was not confirmed and had to return home from Azerbaijan in late 2011.
Boxer and Menendez decided to shelve the nomination of Bryza for two main reasons. First, Bryza comes across as very pro-Azerbaijani because of some comments he has made about Turkey’s role in the Genocide of Armenians and about the Nagorno-Karabakh War. Armenian American activists would have opposed the nomination of Bryza on this basis alone. What has further disenfranchised Armenians and Armenian-Americans is the fact the Bryza’s Turkish-American wife Zeyno Baran. Zeyno is a scholar specializing in Turkish-American relations, Political Islam and other Eurasian issues. She was asked to present opinion and research to the US Senate about the recognition of the Armenian Genocide. She gave a recommendation against recognition. So Bryza had to be opposed from the Armenian standpoint.
While this story comes from a whole host of sources, a main one is an article by Harut Sassounian, an Armenian-American scholar who has advocated for recognition of the Armenian genocide for years. Where the Armenian bias comes into play in his spirited article is whom he sees as the winners and losers of this year long international brinkmanship. On the losing side he places President Obama for pushing a “poorly qualified” candidate into place, the Azerbaijani government and Turkish interest groups for the amount of money they wasted on lobbing to get Bryza confirmed, and 36 US lawmakers who pushed for the Senate approval. Sassounian’s key winners are first and foremost, the Armenian-American lobby that has proved to Washington, Baku and Ankara that Armenia is not to played with as some Roman or Sassanid buffer state. Secondly, he states rather sardonically that, “Matthew Bryza and his wife, who as lobbyists for Azerbaijan and Turkey, can be expected to make millions by cashing in on their high-level connections in Baku and Ankara.”
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