AZERBAIJAN’S FOREIGN MINISTER SAYS TOP GOAL IS SOLVING DISPUTE WITH ARMENIA

AP Worldstream
Published: Mar 21, 2007

Azerbaijan’s foreign minister said Wednesday that his country’s top
foreign policy goal is to settle a long-running territorial dispute
with neighbor Armenia.

Elmar Mammadyarov, speaking to an audience at Johns Hopkins
University’s school of international studies, said both countries
should stop dwelling on past grievances in the dispute over the
territory of Nagorno-Karabakh.

The mountainous area inside Azerbaijan but populated largely by ethnic
Armenians has been controlled by Armenian forces since the end of a
six-year war in 1994 that killed an estimated 30,000 people.

Progress on the matter is crucial to Azerbaijan’s democratic
development, said Mammadyarov, whose oil-rich Caucasus Mountains
country is becoming bolder as its economic strength grows.

"The time is right. We have to make a move," Mammadyarov said. "We
are ready to cooperate with Armenia."

Diplomats from Russia, France and the United States have headed more
than a decade of efforts by the so-called Minsk Group to resolve the
Nagorno-Karabakh issue.

Azerbaijan has been building up its military with an influx of
revenues from oil. It controls portions of the Caspian Sea, on its
eastern fringe, which has some of the largest oil and gas fields in
the former Soviet Union.

Mammadyarov also said that a dispute over Iran’s nuclear program
should be solved through diplomatic means.