Military Spending Increase Could Finance New Karabakh War

AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE
July 25, 2005

QUBA, AZERBAIJAN — Former Soviet Azerbaijan can reconquer the contested
Nagorno Karabakh region
at any time because of its expanded military budget, Azerbaijan’s President
Ilham Aliyev said on July 25.

“This year defense spending has grown by 76 percent, we will create a
powerful army and will be able to liberate our lands at any time,” Aliyev
said during a visit to Quba, a city in northern Azerbaijan.

Aliyev acknowledged that negotiations with Armenia over Nagorno Karabakh
chaired by the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe were
important, but complained that they have “not brought results.”

Azerbaijan will spend $300 million (248 million euros) on its armed forces
in 2005, Aliyev said earlier.

The oil-producing nation increased defense spending earlier this year after
a windfall in the national budget due to higher-than-expected oil prices.

Oil revenues are expected to further increase after a massive U.S.-backed
oil pipeline starts pumping later this year.

The four-billion-dollar Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan pipeline could generate as much
as $160 billion (133 billion euro) in oil revenues to Azerbaijan over the
next 30 years, according to Britain’s BP which heads the consortium running
the pipeline.

Azerbaijan and Armenia fought a war for control over the mainly
ethnic-Armenian Nagorno Karabakh enclave in the early 1990s.

Armenian forces took control of the region and seven others by the war’s
end
in 1994, but its status has yet to be settled and it is still
internationally recognized as part of Azerbaijan.

Some 25,000 people were killed and a further one million displaced as a
result of the Karabakh war.