One cannot say that this campaign has begun only recently: Ilham Aliyev simply continues the work of his father, who devoted all his life and activity to the extermination of the Armenian cultural and physical presence in the Soviet Socialist Republic of Azerbaijan.
Reading over the Azeri press, you arrive at the conclusion that this country is in no way interested in anything else but Armenia. Any information from any part of the world is brought into connection with "insidious" Armenians. All this would be ridiculous, but for one circumstance: population of the neighbouring republic is intensely prepared for a war, which, in the words of Ilham Aliyev, can break out at any moment, since "the patience of the Azerbaijani people is not limitless". It's true that Aliyev has been repeating this sentence for three years already, but now the matter seems to take a serious turn. It is no longer a secret that the highest echelons of Azerbaijan "lack understanding" of what exactly the President wants. On the one hand he makes declarative statements on the return of Karabakh at any price, on the other hand expresses desire to, even so, continue the negotiations. But in order the Aliyev clan would continue to reign in the form of its sultanate, it is necessary that people be kept in the state of constant hysteria. And the best object for this purpose are the Armenians. The clan knows well that as soon as the anti-Armenian hysteria ceases, the population of Azerbaijan will see in what a beggarly state it lives. In fact, all praises about the beauty of Baku and its dynamic development are nothing else but empty words. Here they can reproach us on the fact that we have not been to Baku and it's not us who can judge it. We, certainly, have not been there, but based on some 'unpaid' commentaries we can see in what need our neighbours live, in spite of having hydrocarbons reserves.
And if we comment on the possible war, we must admit that the thirst for revenge may bring some success to the Azerbaijani army, but only in the first stage. And the success, in our view, will consist in the fact that the valiant Azeri army will not immediately run away from the battlefield. The blitzkrieg, so much dreamt in Baku, will fail, and the matter is not only the Armenian army, which, irrespective of the number and armor of the Azeri armed forces, will not return a single inch of earth. Aliyev will at best suffer the same fate as Mikhail Saakashvili, who so poorly began and lost the "reestablishment of constitutional order" in the territory of Tbilisi. But there exists also the worst version for the clan: renunciation of the West from all gas projects connected with Azerbaijan. And it is appropriate here to speak of the first alarming bell that has already rang for Baku: the position of Turkmenistan on the status of the Caspian Region. Ashgabat accuses Azerbaijan of misappropriation of oil-gas fields in the central part of the Caspian Sea. President of Turkmenistan Gurbanguly Berdymuhamedov ordered to address the international experts and high-degree lawyers to learn the Azerbaijan's claims over the disputed fields in the Caspian Sea and legality of the foreign oil-gas companies' operation in those fields and then to send the documents to the International Court of Arbitration. "Such unilateral actions in the Caspian, particularly exploration of the fields without the agreement of the interested parts are unacceptable for Turkmenistan. Based on the principles of the international cooperation, Turkmenistan brought the disputed territories on the agenda of the Turkmen-Azerbaijani negotiations, but there was no agreement. The existent situation is delaying the exploitation of the natural resources of the Turkmen shelf of the Caspian, implementation of the important programs for the economic development of the region and protection of the environmental welfare of the sea and coastal areas," declared the President.
No matter how hard Baku propaganda and agitation section tries to disavow the statement of Ashgabat and its intention to turn to the International Court of Justice, it is possible to definitely say that Aliyev has run into serious difficulties. Let us also add that the initiators of Nabucco are more interested in the Turkmen gas, than in the Azerbaijani. And if it is actually so, chances of Baku for normal cooperation in natural gas projects and an acceptable for it settlement of the Nagorno-Karabakh problem is put off into a very distant future, or, even, into eternity. This is how matters stand, and Baku knows it better than Yerevan .
