ALIYEV: ECONOMIC STRENGTH WILL LEAD TO ADVANTAGEOUS RESOLUTION OF KARABAKH
The New Anatolian, Turkey
July 2 2006
Azerbaijan’s rapidly growing economy will permit it to resolve the
dispute with Armenia over the mountainous Nagorno-Karabakh region
to its own advantage, Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev asserted,
asserting that time is in Baku’s favor.
Aliyev’s comments late Thursday were the latest in a series of
increasingly aggressive statements on the disputed enclave, whose
status remain unresolved more than a decade after a ceasefire ended
six years of open conflict.
Azerbaijan won’t accept any resolution that "doesn’t correspond to
the country’s national interests," said Aliyev, underlining that from
a political viewpoint, Azerbaijan’s superiority is evident and that
its military potential is also growing.
"As for the economy, we’re five times stronger than Armenia now and
in the near future our economic superiority will have increased by
10 to 20 fold," he said. "I’m fully confident that due to this we’ll
be able to settle the Karabakh problem to our advantage."
Stressing that Azerbaijan is willing to solve the problem by peaceful
means, Aliyev however said added that would never compensate for the
loss of its territory.
Nagorno-Karabakh is situated inside Azerbaijan, but is populated
mostly by ethnic Armenians who have run it and seven contiguous
districts since an uneasy 1994 ceasefire 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.
Pushed by international mediators, including France, the U.S. and
Russia, Aliyev and his Armenian counterpart Robert Kocharian, have
already met twice this year to try and agree on a resolution. Neither
effort yielded any results, though some observers have said the fact
that the two presidents continue to meet is positive.
Azerbaijan’s economy has grown substantially in recent years as its
vast Caspian Sea oil reserves have begun to be tapped. Aliyev said
last year that the country’s military spending was set to double to
nearly $300 million.
Foreign ministers at a G8 meeting in Moscow on Thursday called for
a prompt resolution of Nagorno-Karabakh’s status within the year.
"We’re calling on Azerbaijan and Armenia to show the political will
to reach an agreement this year and prepare their peoples for peace
and not war," the joint statement said.