Azernews.Az

BAKU – Azerbaijan has rebuffed the controversial WikiLeaks report that released confidential US cables citing alleged quotes by President Ilham Aliyev. The report has leaked to world media and sparked uproar in Azerbaijan.

The Azerbaijani president's press service said that the views and comments posted on the WikiLeaks website "don't reflect the reality and are absolutely unreasonable".

"This content is an outright provocation aiming to undermine Azerbaijan’s relations with neighboring countries and sow mistrust among leaders," it said in a statement. "The president's vocabulary does not contain the slang expressions or the terse and emotional judgments posted on the website."

The statement made clear that Azerbaijan has never interfered with the neighboring countries’ foreign policies and always pursued a transparent political course aiming to maintain and develop good neighborliness relations with other regional states.

"The Azerbaijani president, in any of the meetings or statements, openly and clearly articulated his views stemming from [Azerbaijan’s] national interests. The country’s foreign policy has always been independent, consistent, logical and sincere."

The WikiLeaks report, released Sunday, contains secret letters allegedly sent by US diplomats to the State Department. The report quotes President Aliyev as making controversial statements about the leaders of numerous neighboring countries. In the most recent letter, ascribed to US Charge D’Affairs Donald Lieu, the Azerbaijani president allegedly said in the February 23 meeting with US Undersecretary of State William Burns that he had "distaste" for the Erdogan government in Turkey, underscoring the "naivete" of Ankara’s foreign policy.

Also, Aliyev was quoted as saying, with reference to Russian President Dmitry Medvedev and Prime Minister Vladimir Putin, that "there are signs of a strong confrontation between the teams of the two men, although not yet between Putin and Medvedev personally," and that "two heads cannot be boiled in one pot" (slang suggesting that two leaders are spoiling for a fight).

President Aliyev was also quoted as saying that Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad had "burnt the bridges" on the nuclear issue and warned him that "wherever Iran is struck from, it will hit there".