Agence France Presse
March 5, 2010 Friday 1:27 PM GMT

Azerbaijan blasts US vote on Armenian ‘genocide’

BAKU, March 5 2010

Azerbaijan on Friday slammed a US Congress panel’s resolution calling
Ottoman-era massacres of Armenians "genocide" and warned that the move
would damage US interests.

A key partner in US-backed energy projects in the Caspian Sea,
Azerbaijan is a close ally of Turkey and is locked in a conflict with
Armenia over the disputed Nagorny Karabakh region.

"This unilateral decision was accepted under pressure from
pro-Armenian congressmen. It contradicts the state interests of the
United States and the interests of the American people," Ali Hasanov,
a senior aide to Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev, told AFP.

"We hope that the House of Representatives will not approve this
resolution. During the First World War many people and many states
suffered losses and it is up to historians to be concerned with these
questions, not the US Congress."

Overriding pressure from the White House and Turkey, the US House
Foreign Affairs Committee narrowly approved the text on Thursday,
opening the door for a vote at the full House of Representatives.

The non-binding resolution calls on President Barack Obama to ensure
that US foreign policy reflects an understanding of the "genocide" and
to label the mass killings as such in his annual statement on the
issue.

Turkey has reacted with fury to the resolution, recalling its
ambassador to Washington and urging Obama’s administration to block
it.

Azerbaijan has backed Turkey’s fierce rejection of the "genocide"
label and accused the international community of ignoring atrocities
committed by Armenian forces during the conflict over Karabakh, a
mainly ethnic Armenian region that broke from Baku’s control after a
war in the early 1990s that left 30,000 dead.

Baku has called on Turkey not to move ahead with fledgling
reconciliation efforts with Armenia until the Karabakh dispute is
resolved.

Since gaining independence with the collapse of the Soviet Union in
1991, Azerbaijan has been at the heart of Western efforts to transport
oil and gas from the Caspian Sea to Europe, decreasing Western
reliance on Russian supplies.

Baku is the starting point for two major pipelines carrying oil and
gas from the Caspian, through Georgia and Turkey, to European
consumers.

From: Emil Lazarian | Ararat NewsPress