First VP aide says double standards exist with regard to Azerbaijan

There are double standards in relation to Azerbaijan, First Vice President Aide Elchin Amirbayov said.

"In 1992, part of our country was under Armenian occupation. But the world did not give a decent response to it. Thus, a similar scenario later took place in Georgia [Abkhazia and South Ossetia], as well as in Moldova [Transnistria]. Today there is a war going on in Ukraine. It is a classic domino effect. You do not respond in one place, and as a result, other similar cases are born," he said in an interview with the Polish TV Weekly, Report informs.

According to him, no international organisation has taken any steps to address Armenia's aggression in 30 years.

"Today we see a war between Russia and Ukraine, which caused the mobilisation of the entire international community. Unfortunately, we did not have such a reaction. It turns out that there are double standards in international organisations in relation to Azerbaijan. Unfortunately, when 20 per cent of our land was illegally occupied when a million people from these lands were subjected to ethnic cleansing, we did not see the countries that wanted to help or protest: Warsaw, Berlin, Paris,” Amirbayov noted.

Furthermore, he stressed that if international organisations had reacted correctly in the early 1990s immediately after the aggression of Armenia against Azerbaijan, the scale and results of this tragic conflict would have been different. There would not have been other similar conflicts in the world.

"The life of the first republic of Azerbaijan and at the same time the first parliamentary republic of the Muslim East did not last long. From 1918 to the entry of the Red Army into our country in 1920. - lasted exactly 23 months,” the aide to the first vice president said, giving a historical overview of Azerbaijan’s independence path and the difficulties it faced in the subsequent stages.

He also underlined that Azerbaijan gained its independence in 1991 as a result of the national liberation movement, which can be compared to the Polish "Solidarity".

“Then in 1993, Heydar Aliyev had to face a very difficult situation. In particular, the economic situation was terrible. We had lost most of our territories in the war with Armenia, and the country was on the brink of civil war. H. Aliyev preserved and strengthened the independence of the state, bringing the economy back in the right direction.

He is not only a great personality, but also a symbol of modern Azerbaijan. We consider him our national leader because he was the architect of the modern Azerbaijan Republic after the restoration of independence in 1991.

Empires like the Soviet Union do everything they can to subjugate those smaller than them. This was not only the case in Azerbaijan. It was the same in Georgia and Moldova. Although Karabakh has repeatedly been the subject of territorial claims of Armenia against Azerbaijan, historically it has always belonged to Azerbaijan.

The Soviets artificially divided Azerbaijan into two parts - the main part of the country and Nakhchivan. The territory between them was given to Armenia. The idea of the Soviets was to abuse the ethnic issue, plant ‘bombs’ reflecting potential separatism and destabilise states if necessary,” Amirbayov emphasised.