BY ERDAL SAFAK
SABAH- The Middle East and the Caucasus are seeing intensive diplomatic efforts right now. The many visitors to these regions seem to be racing against time.
Pope Benedict XVI is now in the Holy Land. In Jordan, the first stop of his tour, he focused on peace and dialogue between Islam and Christianity. In Israel, where he arrived yesterday, he also stressed the fellowship of the three Abrahamic faiths.
Jordan's King Abdullah set off alarms on the first day of the pope's visit. He said that if peace talks in the Middle East are postponed or again fail, a new Arab-Israeli war was inevitable. He also said this could happen as soon as 12-18 months!
On the day Abdullah's alarms echoed in Western capitals, Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu went to Egypt to express his views about proposals for peace. But the same Netanyahu dynamited the entire process about the Golan Heights, which was the foundation of the Syrian-Israeli talks that ended due to the attacks in the Gaza Strip, by saying he would never give up Golan! We'll see the impact of this in Syria on Friday when President Abdullah Gul visits.
Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan will visit Azerbaijan today, in the first step of a series of developments. Erdogan is also expected to visit Moscow this month. Furthermore, diplomatic sources expect that US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton will again visit Ankara afterwards. These visits will be followed by a summit in Saint Petersburg of US President Barack Obama, Russian President Dmitry Medvedev and French President Nicolas Sarkozy, the leaders of the Minsk Group, which is responsible for finding a peaceful solution to the Nagorno-Karabakh issue.
Erdogan's visit to Baku, accompanied by new Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoglu, comes at a time just before important developments on energy issues. At last week's energy summit in Prague, a consensus was reached on signing a governmental-level agreement on the Nabucco gas pipeline project in the near future. Andris Piebalgs, member of the European Commission responsible for energy, said the pact would be signed on June 25. Also, meetings between Turkey and Azerbaijan about gas from the second stage of the Shahdeniz reserves have started. But for a happy ending on Shahdeniz, there should be no clouds in relations between Ankara and Baku. That's why Erdogan's visit is especially important.
Even if the recent tension between Ankara and Baku over efforts to normalize Turkey's relations with Armenia has largely softened thanks to Gul's meeting with his Azerbaijani counterpart Ilham Aliyev in Prague as well as numerous phone calls between the two sides, one critical question has yet to be answered. According to the Azeri press, responding to statements that Turkey had "informed" Azerbaijan at each stage of meetings it held with Armenia under Swiss mediation, Aliyev said that informing and consulting are two different things, and asked if Turkey had set Nagorno-Karabakh as a condition with Armenia.
We know that Erdogan has reiterated at every opportunity that there can't be normalization before the Nagorno-Karabakh issue is solved, and that Turkey doing anything that would hurt the Azeri people or government is out of the question. It seems our Azeri brothers want and expect this to be repeated to their faces. We hope that these expectations will be fulfilled and the Azeri people's doubts about Turkey, which are largely unfair and groundless, will be dispelled by what Erdogan says during his visit.