BAKU, Azerbaijan, Mar. 6
Trend:
During the preparation period, we had to change the international situation in our favor of course, because in the 1990s – I don’t know why, but this was probably a consequence of the times of the Popular Front-Musavat from the early 1990s – they had ruined relations with almost all countries in just one year, President of the Republic of Azerbaijan, Chairman of the New Azerbaijan Party Ilham Aliyev said making a speech at the 7th Congress of the New Azerbaijan Party (YAP) held in a video format, Trend reports.
“They put forward claims to some countries, made us enemies with some neighbors. They are to blame, we know that they are the ones. Acting like henchmen, so to speak, they believed that they could find refuge for themselves. Therefore, we had to destroy those stereotypes. Why should it be that some country has good relations with Armenia and not with Azerbaijan? Why? I wondered what underlay that if there were some fundamental issues if there were fundamental disagreements. No! Just ambitions, incompetence, stupidity, and outside control. They received these signals from abroad – don't get closer to this country, you can't get closer to that, stay away from that. So the Popular Front-Musavat tandem isolated us in our region. We were in an isolated state, but Armenia was not,” the Azerbaijani president said.
“So what did we achieve? Armenia is in an isolated state today, while we are building relations with all our neighbors very effectively, on the basis of friendship and good neighborliness. This was also a kind of preparation. I want to say quite frankly that if this preparatory work had not been done in this area, then we could have faced difficulties in the second Karabakh war. Armenia has isolated itself. In other words, we isolated it from regional projects, from oil and gas projects, ruined their economy, and we can say with a sense of pride that we are the main factor here, as any independent economic expert can confirm. We exposed Armenia as an undecided and unstable country with no future. As economic difficulties increased, the exodus of the population from there became even greater. Demographic problems arose, which in itself led to a narrowing of the economic market. No-one will invest in a narrow economic market. What is there to invest in if there are no people and no money? You have to recover these investments in the future, and this requires a market. In our country, on the other hand, investments came in a large flow, the population was growing, we are already 10 million. As a matter of fact, our population in Soviet times was 7 million and the population of Armenia was 3.5 million. Today the population of Armenia is 1.8 million and ours is 10 million,” the head of state said.