AZERI LEADER WARNS OF NEW WAR AS ARMY PARADES IN CAPITAL
AzTV Baku
June 26 2008
Azerbaijan
Azerbaijan is tired of fruitless peace talks with Armenia and it
can resort to military force at a moment to regain control of the
territories lost during a war in the 1990s, President Ilham Aliyev
told a military parade in Baku on 26 June.
Addressing the parade, which was broadcast live by state television,
Aliyev warned that the war with Armenia was not over yet.
"The war is not over yet. Only the first stage of the war has
ended. There is a cease-fire but this does not mean that the war has
ended," Aliyev said.
Armenians seized the Nagornny Karabakh region and seven surrounding
districts from Azerbaijan during the war, which ended in a cease-fire
in 1994. Peace talks mediated by the USA, Russia and France have
yielded no results since then.
"The Azerbaijani people is tired of the talks. These talks cannot
last forever," Aliyev said. "We need to be ready to liberate our
territories by military force at any moment."
The parade, which was the first in 16 years, was widely seen as a
show of Azerbaijan’s military strength. The country demonstrated its
military hardware, including T-72 tanks, and military aircraft. The
aircraft included MiG-29 and Su-24 fighter jets and also pilotless
reconnaissance planes.
President Aliyev praised Azerbaijan’s army was the strongest in the
region. He added that the country had been able to create a "modern
and very strong military-industrial complex" in the past few years.
The president noted that the defence industry aimed to meet the army’s
need for weapons and military hardware to the maximum.
Aliyev called the ongoing occupation of Azerbaijan’s territories by
Armenians as "big injustice".
"This is big injustice. We cannot stand this," he said, calling
Nagornyy Karabakh an "inseparable part" of Azerbaijan.