AZERI PARLIAMENT MEMBER DEFIES EU WARNING

Armenpress
Aug 31 2006

BAKU, AUGUST 31, ARMENPRESS: A senior member of Azerbaijani ruling
party has openly defied a warning by Brussels that has voiced alarm
at the mounting risk of open warfare in the EU’s southeast neighbors
– Georgia, Armenia and Azerbaijan – amid European plans to sign new
cooperation pacts and build new pipelines in the region.

Aidyn Mirzazade, a member of the ruling board of the governing Yeni
Azerbaijan party said his country must increase its military spending
as much as it needs to drive ‘Armenian occupants’ from Azeri lands.

His remarks came as retaliation to Benita Ferrero-Waldner, EU external
relations commissioner’s speech in Slovenian city of Bled during the
‘Caspian Outlook’ international conference where she called on Georgia
and Azerbaijan to give up plans of settling their conflicts by use
of force. "Negative trends are coming together, the combination of
which is, frankly, alarming," Benita Ferrero-Waldner said in Slovenia
on Monday (28 August), citing a recent upswing in aggressive rhetoric
and arms spending.

"Defense spending is going through the roof," she stated, adding "there
is a serious danger of the rhetoric lowering the threshold for war"
in reference to the so-called "frozen conflicts" of Abkhazia and South
Ossetia in Georgia and Nagorno-Karabakh in Azerbaijan. Georgia’s
military budget proportionally increased faster than any other
country’s in the world last year, while Azerbaijan has boasted that
its military budget in 2007 will be the size of the total budget
of Armenia.

"We shall never cede an inch of land to Armenians and the major
argument is to have an effective army equipped with modern weapons,"
the Azeri, Aidyn Mirzazade, was quoted by Azeri news agency Trend
as saying.