Azerbaijan not to cede land to Nagorno-Karabakh – president

08.06.2004, 15.20

YEVLAKH (Azerbaijan), June 8 (Itar-Tass) – Azerbaijan will not cede
a sod of its land, President Ilham Aliyev said, addressing a meeting
in the city of Yevlakh devoted to the opening a street and a square
named after his father Geidar Aliyev on Tuesday.

He stressed that Azerbaijan would seek to solve the Nagorno-Karabakh
conflict peacefully.

“But if this fails, we will free the occupied territories by any
means. We must be ready for such situation,” Aliyev said, referring
to chunks of land that remained in Azerbaijan’s breakaway Armenian
enclave of Nagorno-Karabakh after a six-year war.

Aliyev said he was optimistic about the future of his country that
has an important place in the region.

He stressed that the focus of the Azerbaijani leadership’s policy
was on “economic and social development, attention to people and care
for them”.

Aliyev said authorities must develop their regions, create new jobs,
favourable conditions for businesses, and attend to youth problems
and needs of people.

During his stay in Yevlakh, a city of 125,000 people, Aliyev inspected
the progress of the construction of a Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan oil pipeline
and visited several social facilities.

He is expected to visit on Tuesday a nearby city of Mingechaur,
one of industrial centres of Azerbaijan