NORMAL FRIENDS:

A handshake shakes a region: Turkey's warming with Armenia stirs up ethnic and energy issues in the strategic Caucasus. (The Monitor's Editorial Board, May 19, 2009, CS Monitor)

Over the past few weeks, energy-rich Azerbaijan has turned up the flame under this geographic cauldron. It was furious with Turkey for agreeing in April to a "road map" to normal relations with Armenia, which backs a separatist Armenian enclave within Azerbaijan called Nagorno-Karabakh. The area was the site of a bloody war in the early 1990s after the Soviet empire broke up, and has since become the oldest "frozen conflict" in the south Caucasus. Armenia-supported separatists hold additional Azeri territory outside the enclave.