Azerbaijan vows to take back disputed enclave from Armenia

AFP
ANKARA, April 14

Azerbaijan’s President Ilham Aliyev on Wednesday vowed that his
country would never give up its struggle to recapture the disputed
enclave of Nagorno-Karabakh which has been under Armenian control for
a decade.

“Nagorno-Karabakh is Azeri territory. It has always been Azeri
territory and will always be so. Azerbaijan will liberate its own
territory whatever the price,” Aliyev said in an address to the
Turkish parliament.

Azerbaijan and neighbouring Armenia went to war in the early 1990s
when Nagorno-Karabakh, mainly populated by Armenians, seceded from
Azerbaijan at the time of the Soviet Union’s collapse, and the two
Soviet Caucasian republics became independent.

The war claimed more than 20,000 lives and made refugees of nearly a
million people.

After a ceasefire in 1994, Nagorno-Karabakh came under de facto
Armenian control.

“The Nagorno-Karabakh dispute should be resolved to make the region
more stable,” Aliyev added.

The Azeri president and his Turkish counterpart Ahmet Necdet Sezer on
Tuesday had spoken out in favour of settling the dispute in a
step-by-step approach, but gave no details.

Earlier, Aliyev had said in a newspaper interview that his country was
ready to mend fences with Armenia if it returned part of the territory
it had seized during the war.

The Nagorno-Karabakh dispute is keenly watched by Turkey, which in
1993 closed its border with Armenia in a show of solidarity with its
neighbour and ally Azerbaijan, with whom it shares close ethnic and
linguistic bonds.

Turkey also has its own row with Armenia over Yerevan’s claims that
the Ottoman Empire committed genocide against Armenians during World
War I — an allegation Ankara categorially rejects.

From: Emil Lazarian | Ararat NewsPress