A gathering of youths to mark the first anniversary of the mass killing at Azerbaijan’s State Oil Academy was forcibly dispersed by police in Baku today. Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty reports that dozens of the mourners were arrested.

A source in Baku told TOL there was no television coverage of the gathering and the police crackdown, but the day’s events were widely reported online, including on social sites such as Facebook and Twitter. Videos like the one below quickly showed up on YouTube, and on the unofficial online Azeri broadcaster ANTV.

Twelve people were killed one year ago today by a gunman who opened fire on students and teachers at the university before killing himself. Initial government efforts to downplay the tragedy generated widespread anger among Oil Academy students and young activists.

An update for readers on Mariam Sukhudyan, the Armenian enviro who was charged with slander last year for publicly alleging abuse of students at a Yerevan school for disabled children at which Sukhudyan volunteered. As Onnik Krikorian reported in December for TOL, Sukhudyan was convinced the charges were retaliation for her campaigning against massive tree-cutting in northeast Armenia’s Teghut forest to make way for a planned copper mine. She was offered plea deals by prosecutors but refused them all.

After meeting Sukhudyan earlier this month at Social Innovation Camp Caucasus in Tbilisi - a two-day event (co-sponsored by TOL) at which teams of techies, activists, bloggers, and others brainstormed media-savvy solutions to social problems - I’m pleased to report that she’s out of the legal woods: all charges arising from her school whistle-blowing were dropped in March.

And, freed from requirements that she remain in Yerevan pending the resolution of her case, she has taken her activism to a new level, hatching an idea for an anti-deforestation web project that won first prize at the SICamp (another disclosure: I was a judge on the panel). She and a multinational team will get $3,000 to realize their plan for Save the Trees, an online platform for Armenians to report on illegal tree cutting in their communities. They hope to expand the idea to neighboring countries.

Meanwhile the campaign to save Teghut suffered a setback 24 March when, for the third time, an Armenian court threw out environmental NGO EcoDar’s suit against the project, ruling the organization was not a party of interest in the matter. EcoDar has said it will take the case to European courts; mining is set to begin in Teghut next year.

EcoDar has produced a video documentary about Teghut, an English-subtitled copy of which Sukhudyan offered me in Tbilisi. You can watch it below.

Teghut: Bread of the Children from Transitions Online on Vimeo.

Media news out of Georgia as a newspaper in the southwestern city of Batumi has accused security forces of trying to blackmail one of its reporters.

According to English-language dispatches on the news sites Media.ge and Civil.ge, Tedo Jorbenadze, coordinator of the investigative unit at weekly Batumelebi, was summoned on 25 November to the local office of the Interior Ministry’s Special Operations Division and shown cropped photographs implying homosexual activity. In a statement, the newspaper said agents told the journalist that Russian and Turkish security services had “an interest towards the Batumelebi newspaper … and they needed his assistance and cooperation.” When Jorbenadze refused, the paper said, the agents said the photos would be sent to his ailing father and posted online.

Batumelebi’s director and editor-in-chief, Mzia Amaghlobeli and Eter Turadze, accompanied Jorbenadze to the divison’s offices but were refused entry. The newspaper has called on prosecutors to investigate what it characterized as a “KGB-style” attempt to intimidate its reporter utilizing the “stigma persisting in Georgia” regarding homosexuality.

(Disclosure: Batumelebi is a client of the Media Development Loan Fund, with which TOL has also worked.)

With tomorrow marking the first anniversary of the start of Russia and Georgia’s five-day war, the heavyweights in the Western press have been offering one-year-after accountings, mostly variations on what GlobalPost, in an admirably direct headline, terms “Assessing the Russia-Georgia chatter.” A year on, the guns may be largely (if not entirely) silent, but the two countries are marking the anniversary with an escalating  series of verbal skirmishes - some of them depressingly familiar, like the exchange of rhetorical fire in recent weeks over alleged shelling in and around South Ossetia.

In a New York Times guest column today, two American experts who’ve worked with Georgian President Mikhail Saakashvili say that Tbilisi’s “democratic backsliding” while enjoying virtually uncritical U.S. backing has had as much influence on U.S. standing in the post-Soviet world as Moscow’s bullying. Citing Tbilisi’s “excessive police action against unarmed protesters, problems with the judiciary and efforts to constrain the media,” Mark Lenzi, Georgia country director for the International Republican Institute, and Lincoln Mitchell, who formerly held the same position with the National Democratic Institute, write:

“Soon after Georgia was labeled a ‘beacon of liberty’ to the world by President Bush in 2005, the country started to regress democratically without so much as a peep from Washington. This was not lost on other, more authoritarian governments in the Caucasus and Central Asia that are still dealing with their own fledgling opposition groups.”

Lenzi and Mitchell’s critical assessment is particuarly noteworthy in light of Saakashvili’s recent offer of cabinet posts to members of the opposition (dismissed by some as a PR move timed for U.S. Vice President Joe Biden’s recent Georgia visit).

But the most interesting of the anniversary crop might be Marc Champion’s The Wall Street Journal account, which views the war of words through the prism of the pending report on the real fighting by an international fact-finding mission headed by Swiss diplomat Heidi Tagliavini, a veteran Caucasus hand and former head of the UN observer mission in Abkhazia.

Originally due 31 July, the report has been delayed until late September as both countries, jockeying to influence the verdict, flooded the mission with 11th-hour documents purporting to prove beyond doubt that Georgia launched hostilities to return South Ossetia to its fold or that Russian troops provoked the fighting by pouring into the disputed region.

The collective upshot of reading all this is the sense that we are going to be marking this anniversary in quite the same fashion for many years to come. The Journal’s Champion quotes Kremlin-friendly Russian political analyst Sergei Markov chillingly name-checking the 35-year Mediterranean stand-off that puts the “frozen” in “frozen conflict.”

Moscow isn’t concerned about the virtually unanimous international rejection of Abkhazia and South Ossetia’s postwar declarataions of “independence,” Markov asserts, because “that’s good for Russia. These countries will be tied to Russia, like northern Cyprus is to Turkey.”

On a day when some 8.500 Russian troops lumbered into the North Caucasus for Russia’s biggest military exercise since the Georgia war, Al Jazeera English has an excellent field piece by Tbilisi-based journalist and blogger Matthew Collin detailing the tensions on the ground as OSCE and UN monitors up stakes in South Ossetia and Abkhazia.

As Daniela Ivanova noted previously in this blog, both missions were vetoed by Russia, essentially on the grounds that the two disputed provinces are now sovereign states (according to Russia, if virtually no one else), and therefore the missions no longer have a mandate.  Collin contrasts this legalistic argument with a snippet of life in the Georgian border village of Ergneti, where locals fear the impact of the international agencies’ departure on an already fragile security situation. “At night it’s terrible,” a farmer who returned after the fighting to his nearly demolished home tells the reporter, “because you can hear all the burnt metal rattling in the wind.”

Meanwhile, AP notes, Russia’s Caucasian war games will run through July 6 - “the day that President Barack Obama arrives in Moscow for a highly anticipated summit with Russia’s Dmitry Medvedev.”

WIth diplomatic progress on Nagorno-Karabakh still glacial, the BBC has a nice bit of on-the-ground reporting today, balancing the usual mix of cautious optimism and bellicosity from Baku and Yerevan with glimpses of the tense communities, ghost towns and concrete trenches of the disputed territory. Notwithstanding Azerbaijan’s recent military build-up and rumors of Russian arms shipments to Armenia, the Beeb concludes that for now “there appears to be no imminent prospect of war.”

Maybe somebody should get the word to Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliev, whom Mosnews.com quotes today as declaring his country “is ready to restore its territorial intergrity by military means any time.” Perhaps Baku’s president-for-life isn’t subscribing to the World Service.

Thanks for checking out Steady State, TOL’s blog on the “frozen conflicts” and other issues and events shaping Georgia, Armenia and Azerbaijan. This blog is still in development, but we’ll start posting soon.