NATO cancels military exercises in Azerbaijan

Xinhua News Agency report.
14/09/2004 01:29

The North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) announced on Monday
that it has canceled military exercises in Azerbaijan hours before
they were due to begin after the authorities in Baku said that it
did not want Armenian troops on its territory.

Xinhuanet — Azerbaijan refused Armenian servicemen to participate
in the war games because many Azeris have bitter memories of a war
between the two countries in the last century. NATO has decided to
cancel the exercises, which had been due to get underway on Tuesday,
an alliance spokesman said in a statement.

“We regret that the principle of inclusiveness could not be upheld
in this case, leading to the cancellation of the exercises,” the
spokesman said.

“The exercises are an important series of live exercises on the
Partnership for Peace calendar. They are designed to provide basic
knowledge on Peace Support Operations (PSO) at small unit level,”
he added.

In the early 1990s, Baku and Yerevan fought a five-year war over the
remote enclave of Nagorno-Karabakh, administratively part of Azerbaijan
but inhabited mainly by Armenians. About 35,000 people died in the
fighting and some one million civilians were displaced. The territory
is now controlled by Armenia.