There is no love lost between Azerbaijan and Armenia. At the heart of their enmity lies the disputed enclave of Nagorno-Karabakh, which sits within Azeri territory. Armenia maintains that its largely ethnic Armenian population there makes it part of the country. It fought a war in 1994 which drove out the Azerbaijan police and army. Azerbaijan, which for its part, has an enclave in Armenia with, however, a border to Iran, continues to demand the return of the Nagorno-Karabakh enclave. Passions run deep on both sides. So deep indeed, that in 2004, an Azeri army officer, in Hungary on a NATO English-language course, took an ax to an Armenian officer on the same program and killed him. A Hungarian court subsequently jailed the murderer, Ramil Safarov, for life. However, the government in Baku succeeded this summer in persuading the Hungarians to release Safarov, on condition that he would serve the rest of his sentence in his home country. Yet, no sooner had the officer stepped off the plane in the Azeri capital, than he was given a presidential pardon, a promotion in rank and eight years in back salary. There have been angry protests in the Armenian capital outside the Hungarian embassy. The Hungarians are also clearly deeply embarrassed and their view will be shared by fellow EU member states. Put bluntly, this is a spectacular act of bad faith by Azerbaijan's president, Ilham Aliyev, which has the potential to poison relations between his country and the EU. Whatever are the two nations' claims of right and wrong in the Nagorno-Karabakh dispute (International law appears to favor Azeri rights over the territory), what is at the heart of this current issue is a case of common murder. Nothing can excuse what Safarov did. His life sentence was undoubtedly fair. The Hungarian government allowed itself to be convinced that the murderer would complete his punishment in his own country, where it would be easy for relatives to visit him and where indeed, he would be back among his own people. No one in Budapest would have imagined that solemn assurances given by another government would be dishonored so quickly in such an outrageous way. There is nothing heroic about cold-blooded murder and the lionization of this convicted killer by his government leaves an extremely bitter taste in the mouth. The people of Azerbaijan who have been hailing Safarov as a hero, should consider how they would be feeling now, if the position had been reversed. Supposing it had been the Armenian officer who had murdered Safarov, been jailed for life, then released into Armenian custody and promptly pardoned, promoted and paid? This regrettable incident is not about deep national rivalries but about the rule of law. It is also about the trustworthiness of a sovereign government. In demonstrating its lack of respect for the primacy of law and the emptiness of its promises, Aliyev's administration has done itself no favors whatsoever and may yet find that it pays a high price for its behavior. It has certainly done nothing to advance its case that Nagorno-Karabakh is part of Azerbaijan.
