ALIYEV: NO HELP FOR US MILITARY ACTION AGAINST IRAN

IranMania, Iran
April 27 2006

LONDON, April 27 (IranMania) – According to an AFP report, visiting
Azerbaijan President Ilham Aliyev ruled out his country taking part
in any possible military operations against neighboring Iran and
said resolving the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict with Armenia was a top
priority for his government.

“Azerbajian will not be engaged in any kind of potential operation
against Iran and our officials in the past, including myself, have
made (this) very clear,” Aliyev told an audience at the Council on
Foreign Relations, an influential Washington think tank.

“Therefore I think it is time to stop speculating on this issue,”
he said.

Aliyev, whose official visit here is his first since his election to
succeed his father in 2003, said his country has a bilateral agreement
with Tehran that clearly forbids either country from staging aggression
against the other from their respective territories, AFP said.

Aliyev comments came ahead of a meeting with US President George W.

Bush on Friday during which the nuclear stand-off with Iran is expected
to be raised.

There has been speculation that Azerbaijan, which is located between
Iran and Russia and which has troops alongside US forces in Iraq as
well as in Afghanistan and Kosovo, could be asked by Washington to
back any potential military action against Iran should diplomacy on
the nuclear issue fail, AFP added.

Aliyev, whose White House meeting with Bush has long been sought
by his government as a way to boost his stature, said he planned to
discuss a wide range of topics with US officials, including bilateral
relations, energy and security issues as well as the conflict in the
Nagorno-Karabakh region, AFP noted.

He said he hoped Washington would help revive the peace process in
Nagorno-Karabakh, which is a disputed part of Azerbaijani territory
that has been controlled since the early 1990s by its majority
ethnic-Armenian population.

Aliyev made clear that his country would not relinquish the territory
and said any settlement would have to guarantee the return of
Azerbaijani refugees to the region while protecting the rights of
the local ethnic Armenian population, AFP stated.

“I think it’s time for the Armenian leadership to behave like
statesemen, to think what will happen in five or 10 years if the
conflict is not resolved,” he said. “The patience of the Azerbaijani
people has a limit.”

The 44-year-old leader also brushed aside criticism concerning
his autocratic rule saying that he saw no chance of any “colour”
revolution in Azerbaijan.

“For that to happen, people have to be unhappy with the government,”
he said, pointing to his country’s economic prosperity.

US officials, who have been criticised for inviting Aliyev to
Washington in light of the US administration’s much-touted democracy
agenda, said democratic reforms would top the agenda during the visit.

“We have said, and we mean it, that to elevate our relationship
with Azerbaijan to a qualitatively new level (…) there needs to
be sustained progress on democracy,” Matthew Bryza, Deputy Assistant
Secretary of State for European and Eurasian Affairs, said.

The New York-based Human Rights Watch said it has urged Bush in
a letter to press Aliyev for concrete progress in the country’s
poor human rights record. T The Armenian Assembly of America, a
Washington-based lobby group, also urged the US leader to denounce
what it said were efforts by Azerbaijan and Turkey to isolate Armenia,
AFP noted.

Observers say Washington’s interest in Azerbaijan is related to its
strategic location and the use of its oil and gas riches to offset
European dependence on Russia.

The Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan oil pipeline, which is expected to become
operational soon, is designed to avoid shipping oil through congested
Turkish straits while also bypassing Russia’s pipeline network,
AFP stated.