Turkey and Azerbaijan to Collaborate on Karabakh and Genocide Denial

BAKU — Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan says Ankara will continue supporting Baku in efforts to resolve the Azerbaijani-Armenian dispute over the Nagorno-Karabakh territory.

Erdogan said after talks with Azerbaijani counterpart Ilham Aliyev in Baku on September 3 ,that “Azerbaijan’s rights have to be taken into consideration in “finding a resolution to the conflict.”

Erdogan added that “if the conflict between Azerbaijan and Armenia [over Karabakh] is resolved, then the problems between Turkey and Armenia will also be solved.”

Azerbaijan, meanwhile, will help Turkey deny in the international arena that the 1915 mass killings of Armenians in the Ottoman Empire constituted genocide, Aliyev said on Wednesday after talks with his visiting Turkish counterpart.

“Turkey and Azerbaijan will jointly counter the lie about the genocide of Armenians,” Aliyev was reported stating to journalists in the presidential palace in Baku.

“We will be coordinating our efforts to expose the fictional Armenian genocide. Our non-governmental and Diaspora organizations will be acting together,” he said.

News reports from Baku suggest that Erdogan, who had angrily denied the Armenian Genocide in the past, did not mention the issue in his statement to the press, which he made after talks with Aliyev. Nor did he echo Aliyev’s calls for jointly countering “Armenian lies and slander.”

Erdogan called Turkey and Azerbaijan “two nations from one stem,” adding that the two countries plan to increase bilateral trade up to $15 billion annually.