Monitoring Desk
ISLAMABAD/BAKU: Azerbaijan government has demanded apologies from France over “slander” during the 2020 Karabakh war with Armenia.
Underlining that there could be several reasons for France’s anti-Azerbaijan stance, Aliyev said that France wanted Karabakh — internationally recognized as a territory of the South Caucasus Turkicnation — to remain at the center of an unresolved and “frozen” conflict.
Apologies over slanders without even evidence
According to the TRT World, “During the conflict, France accused us, slandered us. I demanded an apology from them, and they slandered us without even evidence,” the country’s President Ilham Aliyev said in an interview with local newspapers.
“We haven’t come to peace with this, and I believe this is the actual reason behind their anti-Azerbaijani position. Because we foiled their plans and they couldn’t save Armenia, which they placed under their patronage,” Aliyev said, adding that “Armenian influence” on the French government was another reason for their policy against Baku.
He said that Paris maintained a balanced stance until the start of the 44-day war and that it wanted to remain a mediator despite its policy shift.
He said that “We can live without France, or France can live without us. We have lived as such but if they attempted to normalise that situation, of course, we could not be deaf to it,”.
Relationships between the two former Soviet republics of Armenia and Azerbaijan have been tense since 1991 when the Armenian army occupied Karabakh, a territory internationally recognised as part of Azerbaijan, or seven adjacent regions.
In the fall of 2020, Azerbaijan liberated several cities, villages, and settlements from the Armenian occupation. The Russian and Turkish-brokered peace agreement is celebrated as a triumph in Azerbaijan.
