Transitions Online , Czech Rep.
Feb 18 2010

New media breaches Azeri, Armenian information barrier

report by Onnik Krikorian

With the conflict in the disputed territory of Nagorno-Karabakh still
unresolved, journalists and civil society activists in Armenia have
few opportunities to meet with their Azeri counterparts, and vice
versa. But increasingly, blogs and social networks offer new
possibilities for dialogue across a cease-fire line in place since
1994. Other online tools offer immediate audio and video communication
between the two countries, free from monitoring or interception. If
adopted as general practice by journalists and activists, such tools
could represent a revolution in cross-border cooperation.

For this final segment in our multimedia series on overcoming
stereotypes in the South Caucasus, I interviewed Arzu Geybullayeva, an
Azerbaijani political and regional analyst, about her work on civil
society, women’s, and cross-border issues using new media tools. It
was a rare direct conversation between Yerevan and Baku, conducted
with the voice-over-internet service Skype.

Arzu Geybullayeva with villagers in Karajala, an ethnic Azeri
community in Georgia. Photo by Onnik Krikorian.

Educated in Azerbaijan, Turkey, the United States, and the United
Kingdom, Geybullayeva worked as an Azerbaijan analyst for the
Berlin-based European Stability Initiative until December 2009. Since
then she has been a political officer with the National Democratic
Institute in Baku. She also writes for a variety of online
publications, including the recently launched Women’s Forum.

I first contacted Geybullayeva in late 2008 via her blog, Flying
Carpets and Broken Pipelines, and remained in contact through online
services such as Twitter and Facebook. We met face-to-face last
September in Telavi, Georgia, to make a presentation on new and social
media for Armenian, Azerbaijani, and Georgian youth activists. We also
visited the nearby, ethnically Azeri village of Karajala and posted
photographs, accounts, and multimedia presentations on their blogs
(see an audio slide show about it here), a trip that became the
forerunner of this project.

The podcast can be listened to on: ref HYPERLINK
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