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Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan declared during a visit to Azerbaijan on Thursday that Baku’s fight against Armenia was not over and praised the “glorious victory” of his ally in the bloody conflict with Yerevan.
Erdogan came to Baku to attend the national celebrations of Azerbaijan’s military victory over Armenia in the six-week conflict over Nagorno Karabakh.
Turkey supported Azerbaijan during clashes that broke out in late September and claimed more than 5,000 lives.
Azerbaijan’s victory over the Armenian separatists in Nagorno-Karabakh last month was a major geopolitical blow through which Erdogan established Turkey’s leadership in the former Soviet Caucasus region, which the Kremlin considers its area of influence.
The Azerbaijani army exhibited military vehicles and weapons confiscated from Armenia, as well as Turkish drones. Praising the military parade, Turkish television announced that Turkish drones had “reversed” the Karabakh war.
“We are here today … to celebrate this glorious victory,” Erdogan said during the show held in Baku, the culmination of the celebrations for Azerbaijan’s victory.
He added that “the liberation of Azerbaijan from its lands from occupation does not mean that the struggle is over … The struggle in the political and military spheres will now continue on many other fronts.”
The Azerbaijani and Turkish anthems were played before the military parade attended by Erdogan and his Azerbaijani counterpart Ilham Aliyev.
Aliyev said that Erdogan’s presence “shows the whole world the uninterrupted friendship between the Azerbaijani and Turkish peoples.”
More than 3,000 soldiers took part in the parade, which was also attended by 2,783 Turkish soldiers, a figure that symbolizes the number of Azerbaijani soldiers who died in the clashes. The show was attended by a Turkish commando squad.
Turkey support
Ankara has been accused of sending mercenaries from Syria to reinforce the Baku army, but this has been denied.
“Azerbaijan would not have been able to achieve military success in Karabakh without Turkey’s open political support,” analyst Ilhan Sahinoglu of the Baku-based think tank “Atlas” told AFP.
The fighting ceased after the conclusion of an agreement to stop hostilities under the auspices of Moscow, which dedicates an Armenian military defeat and major field advances to Baku, after Azerbaijani forces approached the larger city of Karabakh, Stepanakert.
The deal sparked outrage in Armenia, where the opposition is now demanding the resignation of Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan.
Under the agreement, Armenia gave up control of parts of the region that it lost during the fighting, in addition to seven adjacent areas that it had controlled during the previous war in the 1990s.
Under the agreement, the Nagorno Karabakh region, whose status has not been determined, will remain the same, but with a smaller area and a weaker force.
About two thousand Russian blue helmets will be deployed there, with a mission that is renewed every five years. The truce will be supervised in Azerbaijan by the Turkish army.
Karabakh separatists split from Baku in a war in the early 1990s, which resulted in the death of 30,000 people and the displacement of tens of thousands of Azerbaijanis.
And its declaration of independence did not gain international recognition, not even from Armenia.
“One nation, two states”
On Thursday, Amnesty International announced that Azerbaijan and Armenia should urgently investigate “war crimes” committed by both sides during the fighting.
Amnesty said it analyzed 22 video recordings showing “arbitrary executions, abuse of prisoners of war and other prisoners of war and mutilation of corpses of soldiers on the enemy side.”
Armenia accused Turkey of direct involvement in the fighting, which both Baku and Ankara deny.
Armenia regards Turkey as an enemy throughout history, and Armenians do not forget the memory of the genocide to which they were subjected in the last century. The border between the two countries has been closed since 1993 and diplomatic relations between them have not been linked since then.
An estimated 1.5 million Armenians were systematically killed by the forces of the Ottoman Empire during the First World War.
Turkey rejects the term “genocide” and emphasizes that these incidents were mutual massacres between the two parties.
In 2009, Erdogan rejected reconciliation efforts with Yerevan under international auspices, insisting that diplomatic relations could only be resumed after the withdrawal of Armenian forces from Nagorno-Karabakh.
The alliance between Baku and Ankara, which is described by the slogan “One nation, two states”, began when the Turkish-speaking Muslim state of Azerbaijan gained independence from the Soviet Union in 1991 and was strengthened during the presidency of Recep Tayyip Erdogan.
Political, economic and military cooperation between the two countries enabled Turkey to help Azerbaijan train and equip its army and facilitate fuel exports to Europe to avoid Russia.
