AZERBAIJANI DELEGATION POSTPONES ITS VISIT TO U.S. DUE TO REFORMULATED EXPRESSION ABOUT NKR ON STATE DEPARTMENT’S SITE

Noyan Tapan
Apr 23 2007

BAKU, APRIL 23, NOYAN TAPAN. Azerbaijan has postponed the visit of
its delegation to U.S. The Turkish Zaman mentions that the reason
of the decision is some change of the expression related to Nagorno
Karabakh and its adjacent territories by U.S. State Department in
its 2006 report on human rights, which was placed on the official
web-site of the State Department.

The Azerbaijani delegation planned to leave for U.S. on April 23-24,
during which it was to have bilateral consultations related to issues
of security.

To recap, the following expression about Armenia had been included
in State Department’s 2006 report on human rights: "Armenia occupied
Nagorno Karabakh and 7 Azerbaijani regions." In the future, however,
that sentence was reformulated and placed on State Department’s
web-site, which read: "The Armenian armed forces occupy the most part
of Azerbaijan’s territories adjacent to Nagorno Karabakh."

In this connection the Azerbaijani Foreign Minister made a statement,
which read: "The neutrality shown by U.S. in the process of solution of
Nagorno Karabakh problem seems to be doubtful. So, as a result of such
steps cooperation carried out within the framework of two countries’
security comes across serious obstacles."