Day.Az, Azerbaijan
May 28 2009

Azeri official comments on president’s "harsh" statement on Karabakh

Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev’s latest "harsh and at the same
time frank" statement on the Nagornyy Karabakh conflict settlement was
a message both to Armenia and the international mediators whose
activity satisfies neither the Baku government nor the Azerbaijani
public, a senior official from the Azerbaijani presidential
administration, Fuad Axundov, has said.

In an interview with Russian Interfax news agency, published on the
Baku-based Day.az website on 30 May, Axundov said that the president’s
statement made it clear that it was impossible to make Baku agree to
concessions in the issue of Nagornyy Karabakh’s status by putting
pressure on it.

Axundov said that President Aliyev had also sent a message to the EU
when he said that "not a single project, or a question, or an
initiative – no matter who stands behind it – can be implemented in
the region without Azerbaijan’s involvement or without considering its
national interests".

"The president purposefully raises the issue in such a forthright and
blunt manner in order to show that the patience of the public and the
country’s leadership has been stretched," Day.az quoted Axundov as
saying. "There is another important signal – all the attempts to
involve Yerevan into regional projects, which are actively lobbied by
some western countries and organizations, are doomed to failure unless
there is progress in the settlement of the conflict. This point made
by the head of state is first of all meant for the EU which naively
believes that it can involve Armenia into multilateral regional
projects within the framework of the Eastern Partnership programme."

In an address made on the occasion of Republic Day on 27 May,
President Ilham Aliyev said that the agenda of the talks with Armenia
included "the return of all occupied lands to Azerbaijan and the
return of all displaced persons to their native lands", Baku-based APA
news agency reported on 28 May. "There are no mechanisms to separate
Nagornyy Karabakh from Azerbaijan on the negotiating table and there
can be none," APA quoted Aliyev as saying. The Azerbaijani president
also said that the only reason the Nagornyy Karabakh conflict has not
been resolved yet is "Armenia’s unconstructive position and its
tactics aimed at artificially delaying the negotiations process", APA
said.