AZERI PRESIDENT SAYS MUNICH TALKS LAST CHANCE TO SETTLE KARABAKH PEACEFULLY
ANS TV
Nov 21 2009
Azerbaijan
If the next meeting with the Armenian president does not yield a
result, Azerbaijan may try to regain its Armenian-occupied territories
militarily, Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev has said.
Aliyev said the meeting scheduled to take place in Munich on 22
November might be crucial in the settlement of the long-standing
conflict over the Nagornyy Karabakh region.
"This meeting has to play a crucial role in the negotiations," private
ANS TV showed Aliyev in the western district of Goranboy addressing
a group of displaced people from Nagornyy Karabakh on 20 November.
"Several meetings have been held this year, and none of them was
fruitful. If this meeting, too, does not yield any results, then
we will lose hope in the negotiations. And if we lose hope in the
negotiations, we will have no other choice, and we have to be ready
for that.
"The work done in the field of army building over the past years has a
definite goal, naturally. We are spending billions to strengthen our
army, purchase new weapons, equipment, to reinforce our positions on
the contact line. We are doing this because we have never ruled out
this option. We have the full right to liberate our lands militarily.
International legal norms also recognize this right.
"Simply, we want this issue to be settled peacefully, and we do not
want war. But if Armenia thinks that we will be holding talks for
ever, it is mistaken. If we see that Armenia is simply dragging time
and it wants to make it an eternal problem through talks, then an
end will be put to the negotiations," Aliyev said.
The president said that Armenia was no match for Azerbaijan in terms
of economic development and army building and ruled out any economic
cooperation with Armenia until the Nagornyy Karabakh conflict is
resolved.
"How can there be any cooperation? One country has occupied another
country’s land, left people homeless and has carried out a policy
of ethnic cleansing, and then they say you should cooperate. This is
out of the question," he said.
Aliyev also said that some international organizations might think
that freezing the settlement of the conflict was better than war.
"Some international organizations may think that let the situation
continue as it is, what is important is that there is no war, some
even do not care about what conditions our people have been living
in, and that has been going on not for a year or a couple of years
but for almost 20 years. But how can one tolerate that. Some think
it had better stay in this frozen state than there is war. We cannot
be satisfied with this status quo," the Azerbaijani president said.