Baku, Azerbaijan, Jan. 5
By Elchin Mehdiyev - Trend:
David Kramer, the former head of the Freedom House and current senior director for human rights and human freedom at the McCain Institute for International Leadership, has once again proposed to impose sanctions on Azerbaijani government, and urged to boycott the First European Games to be held in Baku in 2015.
However, the main point of each article is contained in its conclusion, and so Mr. Kramer's lampoon ends up with emphasizing Azerbaijan's importance as a strategic partner in the field of energy and security.
That is, Kramer himself puts a question and answers it himself. To make a long story short, it is a classic Kramer vs. Kramer situation.
But let's put aside all of Kramer's baseless accusations and sort out the things.
The former head of the Freedom House, an organization "exporting freedom and democracy", urges to impose on Azerbaijan's government the sanctions that are similar to those imposed against Russia and Belarus.
So what? What have the US and Europe gained from those sanctions? Absolutely nothing.
In principle, it is easy to run into response actions from the "strategic partner in the field of energy and security."
It is not the beginning of the 90s. There are plenty of those who want to take the Western companies' place in the Azerbaijani projects, and moreover Baku has gained enough experience to do without many of those companies.
And this is evident in practice. The Western companies' shares in the major oil and gas projects in Azerbaijan are bought either by Azerbaijan's State Oil Company or by the players from the East - India and Malaysia.
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Elchin Mehdiyev is the staff journalist of Trend Agency's Azerbaijani news service
