AZERBAIJANI LEADER: ECONOMIC STRENGTH TO ALLOW ADVANTAGEOUS RESOLUTION OF DISPUTED TERRITORY
Aida Sultanova
AP Worldstream
Jun 29, 2006
Azerbaijan’s rapidly growing economy would allow it to resolve the
dispute with Armenia over the mountainous Nagorno-Karabakh territory
to its own advantage, Azerbaijan’s president said Thursday.
Ilham Aliev’s comments were the latest in a series of increasingly
aggressive statements on the mountainous territory, whose status
remain unresolved more than a decade after a cease-fire ended six
years of open conflict.
Foreign ministers from the Group of 8 major industrialized nations,
meeting in Moscow, called for prompt resolution of Nagorno-Karabakh’s
status and other lingering conflicts in the former Soviet Union.
Nagorno-Karabakh is inside Azerbaijan, but is populated mostly by
ethnic Armenians, who have run it and seven contiguous districts since
an uneasy 1994 cease-fire ended six years of full-scale war. Sporadic
border clashes regularly break out and the unresolved conflict has
held up development in the strategic region.
Azerbaijan would not accept any resolution that "doesn’t correspond
to the country’s national interests," Aliev said.
"From a political viewpoint, Azerbaijan’s superiority is evident,
our military potential is also growing," he told a crowd in Ujar,
250 kilometers (155 miles) west of the capital, Baku.
"As for the economy, we are five times stronger than Armenia now and
in the near future our economic superiority will be increased by 10,
20 fold," he said. "I am fully confident that due to this we’ll be
able to settle the Karabakh problem to our advantage."
"Azerbaijan is willing to solve the problem by peaceful means, but
it will never reconcile with the loss of its territories," he said.
Pushed by international mediators including France, the United States
and Russia, Aliev and his Armenian counterpart, Robert Kocharian, have
already met twice this year to try and agree on a resolution. Neither
effort has yielded any results, though some observers have said the
fact that the two presidents continue to meet was positive.
Azerbaijan’s economy has grown substantially in recent years as its
vast Casp ian Sea oil reserves have begun to be tapped. Aliev said
last year that the country’s military spending was set to double to
nearly US$300 million in 2005.
In Moscow, meanwhile, G-8 diplomats called for Armenia and Azerbaijan
to reach an agreement this year on the territory.
"We call on Azerbaijan and Armenia to show political will with the
aim to reach an agreement this year and prepare their peoples for
peace and not for war," the joint statement said.
From: Emil Lazarian | Ararat NewsPress
