“How is my Alija?” he asked, after reading a short letter I brought to him from Alija Izetbegovic, the president of Bosnia and Herzegovina at the time. There was a certain intimacy in his question, though he had never seen the man. This might be because both shared a Slavic variant of the same name: Ali, one of the most common in the Muslim world.

 Izetbegovic’s first name, pronounced Aliya, was not easy to explain to Arabs, particularly because it sounds feminine. Aliyev’s family name bears a remnant of Russian influence, else it would be Alioğlu. However, the lives of Aliyev and Izetbegovic led them to completely opposite approaches to Ali, the son-in-law of God’s messenger, Muhammad. While the former was the only Muslim to ever become a member of the Soviet Communist Party’s politburo, the latter was imprisoned by the Yugoslav communist system for his pamphlet titled “The Islamic Declaration.”

I was reminded of this encounter by a protocol on renewing diplomatic relations the foreign ministers of Turkey and Armenia signed in Zurich on Oct. 10. Swiss mediation would not have seen success had the two countries not been adamant about reaching a compromise -- Turkey with its dynamic policy of reducing open issues with neighbors to zero, and Armenia with the desire to end its political and economic isolation. The momentum of that far-reaching diplomatic achievement is of no less importance. With the advent of the “de-Bushization” of US foreign policy, the traditional interests of big world powers and integrations are not being led into confrontation. Rather, they are being put to a test of power.

Russia’s hold evaporating

Those of us in the Balkans behave as if we are in the center of such tests. However, experiments over influence and power by the US, Russia, NATO, the European Union and even China and Iran are being made in in the Eurasian crossroads, the Caucasus, more so than in the Balkans. Russia’s hold over the whole northern coast of the Black Sea is evaporating, and Western values and influence are increasing. Above all, its oil fields and transportation routes make international efforts to ensure that region’s stability more important than for many other areas. “The South Caucasus is gradually falling under the influence of the US and Turkey,” stresses Vefa Guluzade from the Baku-based Caspian Research Center.

This much can be understood even from some ephemeral moments surrounding the Turkish-Armenian agreement in Switzerland. The signing ceremony was attended by top diplomats of the US, Russia, France and the EU. And while US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton made seven telephone calls before the signing ceremony, one moment speaking with the Armenian foreign minister and the next with his Turkish counterpart, convincing them to not make irritating statements, she sent only her undersecretary to Sarajevo to try to ease Bosnia’s constitutional crisis. Contrary to Zurich’s promising move, this was only one more useless effort in Sarajevo.

One of two major conditions for the further normalization of relations between Armenia and Turkey -- and the entire Caucasus region in general -- is to be found within the territory of Azerbaijan. The question aside, one that has lasted almost a century -- namely, whether the massacre of Armenians was genocide or not -- the problem of Nagorno-Karabakh is almost just as old. However, it does not belong to an abstract sphere, but to the sphere of everyday “life or death” for hundreds of thousands of Armenians and Azerbaijanis.

It is well known that the Caucasus, a region of high, rugged mountains and green, fertile valleys, broke into pieces after the fall of the Ottoman and Russian empires -- not because the people living there wanted it so, but as a result of a design prepared by powers that were drawing the world maps of the 20th century. Adding the Austro-Hungarians to the defeated empires, almost the same happened in the Balkans.

Karabakh, which belonged to Azerbaijan, was also part of such designs. Great Britain, for example, did not support the first rebellion by its Armenian majority, but the integrity of Azerbaijan. Britons were the first to smell the scent of petrol from the Caspian coasts, and it was in their interest to build up an influence in Baku that would prove remunerative to this day, as British Petroleum leads the consortium for oil production in that country. None of the Russian leaders, from Lenin to Gorbachev, succeeded in finding a solution for Nagorno-Karabakh’s status.

When new states started to spring up after the collapse of former Russian and other communist regimes in Eastern Europe, war broke out in Azerbaijan. The dismemberment of Yugoslavia, too, could not take place peacefully. Thus, the dispute surrounding the Azerbaijani province of Nagorno-Karabakh can be compared to events that transpired in the Balkans from the 1990s until today. Some differences aside, there were many things that could be compared with the situation in Croatia, Serbia, Kosovo and particularly in Bosnia that I was trying to explain to the president of Azerbaijan while moving my forefinger over a big map.

The war over Nagorno-Karabakh flared up in the spring of 1992, almost at the same time as the aggression against Bosnia. The Armenian army entered Azerbaijan to assist the local Armenian rebellion, just as the Serbian army supported Bosnian Serbs. About 700,000 Azerbaijanis and 250,000 Armenians were made refugees after they were forced out of their villages and places they had lived in together for centuries. The ethnic cleansing in Bosnia caused millions of refugees as well.

 It is believed that there were around 1,000 mujahideens from Afghanistan in the Azerbaijani war. In the Bosnian war, there was about the same number of so-called fighters for Islam, mostly Arabs. They had previous experience in Afghanistan, Palestine and Chechnya -- and had more later in Iraq and again in Afghanistan -- giving a pretext to many Serbs and Croats to accuse Bosnians of seeking to establish an Islamic state. Some of those mujahideens from Bosnia ended up in prison in Guantanamo.

Numerous resolutions by the UN Security Council to withdraw Armenian forces from Azerbaijan, or for a cease-fire in Bosnia, were in vain. Bosnia even got a version of the Lachin corridor of Azerbaijan in the district of Brcko, dividing two parts of its Serb entity.

Differences between cases

The situation established by the cease-fire in Azerbaijan, achieved by Russian mediation in 1994, and a year later in Bosnia by the Dayton Peace Accords, imposed by the Americans, has generally not changed. There are, of course, some significant differences between the two cases. While in Bosnia there are no occupying forces, except a few thousand NATO peacekeepers, the Armenian army still controls around 20 percent of Azerbaijani territory. A move made by Croatia in 1995, when its army crushed Serb paramilitary forces that had been occupying about 20 percent of the country’s territory, does not seem realistic at all in the Azerbaijani case. Contrary to Croatia, provided with American political support and heavy arms by some European powers, Azerbaijan might not even get support from Turkey, its closest friend, to launch a new military campaign.

The status of Nagorno-Karabakh is still to be solved, despite its self-proclaimed independence, while the status of the Bosnian entity Republika Srpska was formally solved in Dayton. However, it is still considered by most Bosniaks (Bosnian Muslims) and Croats to be a “genocidal creature,” while its leaders often call Sarajevo, the Bosnian capital, Teheran. They use every opportunity to strengthen their entity’s “statehood” and further disintegrate the common state of Bosnia and Herzegovina, having more or less hidden support from Serbia, and through Serbia from Russia. There is one more association: In the entity of Republika Srpska, comprising 49 percent of the country, one can barely find any trace of Bosnian symbols. This, I suppose, is the same as how it is still difficult to find Azerbaijani symbols in Nagorno-Karabakh, or as its Armenian officials formally call it, the Nagorno-Karabakh Republic (NKR), better known by the common people as “the land of the Artsakhs.”

Returning to my old meeting with President Aliyev, I hope my answer to him was clear when he asked me, moving his large fist over red-colored parts of Bosnia and Herzegovina’s map, marking the Serb entity, “And how much control does Alija Izetbegovic have over these parts of Bosnia?”

After hesitating a bit, I dared answer in a less than diplomatic way, saying, “As much control as you have over Nagorno-Karabakh.”

After throwing a surprising glance at me, he smiled, putting his heavy fist on my shoulder.