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ANKARA: Aliyev: Economic Strength Will Lead To Advantageous Resoluti

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  • ANKARA: Aliyev: Economic Strength Will Lead To Advantageous Resoluti

    ALIYEV: ECONOMIC STRENGTH WILL LEAD TO ADVANTAGEOUS RESOLUTION OF KARABAKH

    The New Anatolian, Turkey
    July 2 2006

    Azerbaijan's rapidly growing economy will permit it to resolve the
    dispute with Armenia over the mountainous Nagorno-Karabakh region
    to its own advantage, Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev asserted,
    asserting that time is in Baku's favor.

    Aliyev's comments late Thursday were the latest in a series of
    increasingly aggressive statements on the disputed enclave, whose
    status remain unresolved more than a decade after a ceasefire ended
    six years of open conflict.

    Azerbaijan won't accept any resolution that "doesn't correspond to
    the country's national interests," said Aliyev, underlining that from
    a political viewpoint, Azerbaijan's superiority is evident and that
    its military potential is also growing.

    "As for the economy, we're five times stronger than Armenia now and
    in the near future our economic superiority will have increased by
    10 to 20 fold," he said. "I'm fully confident that due to this we'll
    be able to settle the Karabakh problem to our advantage."

    Stressing that Azerbaijan is willing to solve the problem by peaceful
    means, Aliyev however said added that would never compensate for the
    loss of its territory.

    Nagorno-Karabakh is situated inside Azerbaijan, but is populated
    mostly by ethnic Armenians who have run it and seven contiguous
    districts since an uneasy 1994 ceasefire ended six years of full-scale
    war. Sporadic border clashes regularly break out and the unresolved
    conflict has held up development in the strategic region.

    Pushed by international mediators, including France, the U.S. and
    Russia, Aliyev and his Armenian counterpart Robert Kocharian, have
    already met twice this year to try and agree on a resolution. Neither
    effort yielded any results, though some observers have said the fact
    that the two presidents continue to meet is positive.

    Azerbaijan's economy has grown substantially in recent years as its
    vast Caspian Sea oil reserves have begun to be tapped. Aliyev said
    last year that the country's military spending was set to double to
    nearly $300 million.

    Foreign ministers at a G8 meeting in Moscow on Thursday called for
    a prompt resolution of Nagorno-Karabakh's status within the year.

    "We're calling on Azerbaijan and Armenia to show the political will
    to reach an agreement this year and prepare their peoples for peace
    and not war," the joint statement said.
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