YEREVAN (Tert.am), March 9–Although solidarity with Azerbaijan has led Turkey to tie the approval of the Armenian protocols to progress on Karabakh, there are questions as to whether Baku sufficiently opposed a recent Armenian Genocide resolution in the US Congress, reports Turkish news source Hurriyet Daily News and Economic Review.

A key partner in US- and EU-backed energy projects in the Caspian Sea, Azerbaijan is a close ally of Turkey and has been locked in a frozen conflict with Armenia over Nagorno-Karabakh.

“The Azerbaijani calls for boycott campaigns in April-May 2009 were designed and conducted in a highly professional way. They have also been developing their public diplomacy toward Washington and Brussels on issues related to the conflict over Nagorno-Karabakh,” Burcu Gültekin Punsmann, senior foreign policy analyst at the Turkish think-tank TEPAV, told the Hürriyet Daily News in an interview.

“Interestingly, however, pro-Azerbaijani advocacy groups kept silent before the process that led to the March 4 vote in the US,” she said.

A US House Foreign Affairs Committee headed by deputy Howard Berman narrowly passed a non-binding resolution on Thursday labeling the World War I-era killings of Ottoman Armenians as Genocide. With the passage of the bill, the door is now open to a full House vote.

Reacting against the resolution, Turkey said the vote not only risked slowing down the normalization efforts with Armenia, but also risked bringing them to a complete halt.

One expert said Azerbaijan had been silent on the issue despite Turkey’s anger at the resolution.

“Azerbaijan failed to make its voice heard strongly in opposing the Genocide resolution,” said Kamer Kasım, Caucasus expert at Turkish think tank USAK.

“The Turkish-Armenian Protocols led to a serious disappointment in Azerbaijan and the likelihood of the opening of the sealed border between Ankara and Yerevan created question marks in Baku despite assurances from the Turkish government that the border would not be opened unless a solution is found to the Nagorno-Karabakh problem,” he said.

Turkish and Azerbaijani interests overlap in their opposition to the Armenian lobby in the US, Kasım said, but wondered whether the Azerbaijani lobby in the U.S. had made much of an effort to display solidarity with Ankara in attempting to block the resolution, other than a written condemnation.

“But it would not be realistic to expect much more than that from Baku,” he said.

One day after the vote, Azerbaijan slammed the resolution, saying the move could damage U.S. interests in the Caspian country. Baku has backed Turkey’s rejection of the Genocide label and accused the international community of remaining indifferent to the atrocities committed by Armenian forces during the Karabakh conflict.

It also called on Turkey not to move ahead with normalization efforts with Armenia until the Karabakh dispute is resolved.