Azernews.Az

BAKU – Azerbaijan hopes for a decisive position of the international community on its conflict with Armenia over Nagorno Karabakh that would pave the way for long-term peace and prompt Yerevan to tackle work on a final peace accord based on the principles proposed by international mediators, the Azerbaijani Foreign Ministry said on Friday.

The Foreign Ministry’s report summarizing the outcomes of 2010 and outlining foreign policy goals for 2011, said that last year Azerbaijan stepped up its policies aiming to restore its territorial integrity and bolster its position and influence on the world stage.

Azerbaijan and Armenia fought a lengthy war that ended with the signing of a precarious cease-fire in 1994. Armenian armed forces have since occupied over 20 percent of Azerbaijan's internationally recognized territory, including Nagorno Karabakh, defying international calls and UN resolutions. Peace talks, brokered by the United States, Russia and France through the OSCE Minsk Group, have been largely fruitless so far.

The report said that Baku carried out an extensive workload in 2010 to heed international attention to the Armenian occupation of Azerbaijani territories and achieve due political assessment of this fact by influential international organizations, including the United Nations, the OSCE, NATO, the Council of Europe and the European Union.

These efforts led to the delegation of an OSCE appraisal mission to the occupied Azerbaijani territories last October, which sought to evaluate the condition of Azerbaijan’s cultural monuments. A report of the mission is due to be released later this month, the ministry said.

The mission also aimed to scrutinize the illegal settlements in Nagorno Karabakh and other Armenia-occupied territories of Azerbaijan.

The report said further that Azerbaijan’s foreign policy last year also sought to strengthen cooperation with Europe and Euro-Atlantic organizations. The year 2010 saw the approval of Azerbaijan’s mandate to begin talks on an Association Agreement between the European Union and Azerbaijan. The agreement is to be signed under Eastern Partnership, a program that envisions the EU’s closer political, economic and energy cooperation with six former Soviet republics, including Azerbaijan.

The ministry noted that last year also marked Azerbaijan’s closer cooperation with NATO and a completion of the second stage of the NATO Individual Partnership Plan (IPAP) covering its cooperation with the alliance.

Overall, the year 2010 saw extensive political activeness of Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev, who paid a large number of official visits as well as hosted a number of world leaders. Some 100 international documents were signed as a result of Baku’s talks with about 50 countries.

Azerbaijan also expanded the scope of its diplomatic representation abroad in 2010. The country opened embassies in Croatia, Estonia, Serbia, Libya and Argentina, general consulates in the Russian city of Yekaterinburg and in Georgia’s Batumi, and honorary consulates in Stuttgart, Germany and the US city of Santa Fe. Moreover, Austria, the Netherlands, Palestine and Indonesia opened their embassies in Azerbaijan, and Turkey opened a general consulate in Ganja, the country’s second largest city. Also, decisions were made last year to open Azerbaijani embassies in South Africa, Iraq, Vietnam and Brazil.

Azerbaijan also established diplomatic relations with Swaziland, the Marshall Islands, Saint Lucia, Fiji and Grenada according to joint statements signed with these countries.

In 2011, the priorities in Azerbaijan’s foreign political course will be leveraging all forces to achieve a settlement to the Nagorno Karabakh conflict based on the country’s territorial integrity; maintaining good neighborliness relations in the Caspian region; bolstering the position of the resource-rich country, which is also a stable and reliable transit state for transporting hydrocarbons; and effectively capitalizing on the opportunities to promote inter-civilization dialog, the report said.