Embassy Row

ARMENIANS ANNOYED

Armenian-Americans are skeptical over President Obama’s nomination of an ambassador to Azerbaijan, suspecting him of bias against a disputed ethnic-Armenian enclave within the southwestern Asian nation that led to war in the 1990s.

Mr. Obama’s selection of Matthew Bryza, a career diplomat, this week “drew comment and concern in Armenian political circles [for] … holding unconcealed affection towards Azerbaijan,” according to a report in ArmeniaNow.com on reaction from Armenian analysts.

The entangled conflict between Armenia, which is 95 percent Christian, and Azerbaijan, which is 95 percent Muslim, dates back centuries. But the ethnic-Armenian claims to Nagorno-Karabakh in 1991 sparked a war that claimed thousands of casualties and displaced hundreds of thousands on both sides.

Fighting broke out between Azerbaijan and ethnic-Armenians who declared Nagorno-Karabakh an independent nation and eventually drew Armenia into the conflict before Azerbaijan agreed to a cease-fire in 1994, with Armenians in control of 14 percent of the country.

In 2006, Mr. Bryza, a specialist in Europe and Eurasian affairs, was assigned as a co-chairman of a committee of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) created to negotiate a settlement of the Nagorno-Karabakh dispute.

Armenian-Americans say Mr. Bryza displayed a pro-Azerbaijani bias during those peace talks.

“We look to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and the full U.S. Senate to carefully scrutinize Mr. Bryza’s record, his formal testimony and responses to inquiries that he will face during his confirmation process,” Aram Hamparian, executive director of the Armenian National Committee of America told ArmeniaNow.

Azerbaijani officials, while not critical of Mr. Bryza, were disappointed with the U.S. position in the so-called Minsk Group of the OSCE. Ali Hasanov, an aide to President Ilham Aliyev, has complained that the United States was biased toward the Armenians in Nagorno-Karabakh.

LOOTED TREASURE

The leaders of a congressional human rights panel insist that Eastern European nations have a moral duty to return treasures looted by Nazis to their Jewish owners or their relatives.

At a hearing of the U.S. Commission on Security and Cooperation in Europe this week, they also noted that some countries that have refused to return priceless works of art and display the looted treasures in national museums. Some authorities estimate that 100,000 pieces of art and other valuable stolen objects remain in the hands of European governments.

“Our government must pursue justice for those robbed by the Nazis and their accomplices and still defrauded by governments who connive at the Nazis’ crimes by refusing to make them right,” said Rep. Christopher H. Smith of New Jersey, the senior Republican on the panel.

Rep. Alcee L. Hastings, Florida Democrat and the commission co-chairman, complained about restrictive inheritance laws in the Czech Republic.

“There is something perverse about applying the normal rules of inheritance to the extraordinary and tragic circumstances created by the Holocaust,” he said.

Sen. Benjamin L. Cardin, Maryland Democrat and the commission chairman, cited Lithuania and Poland for their failure to return stolen property. However, he recognized that Poland was a special case because of border changes and population resettlements after World War II.

“Addressing this issue in Poland may be especially challenging, but I do not believe it is impossible,” he said.

Mr. Cardin also objected to Lithuania’s “needlessly restrictive” laws on the return of stolen religious property.

Ambassador Stuart Eizenstat, a State Department adviser on Holocaust issues, added that corruption and bureaucratic delays have “marred property restitution in too many countries.”

• Call Embassy Row at 202/636-3297 or e-mail jmorrison@washingtontimes.com.