Aliyev repeats 'Western Azerbaijan' claims at Baku forum

PanARMENIAN.Net - Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev once again referred to the concept of “Western Azerbaijan” during his speech at the international conference in Baku titled “Islamophobia in Focus: Unmasking Prejudices and Eliminating Stigmas.”

Addressing the audience, Aliyev—whose government is erasing Armenian historical and cultural heritage in Artsakh—claimed that Azerbaijanis had been expelled from their “historic lands” and that their “material and spiritual heritage” was deliberately destroyed in what he called Western Azerbaijan.

“In Western Azerbaijan—our historical lands, from which our compatriots were expelled—a deliberate and systematic policy is being implemented to destroy the rich material and spiritual heritage of the Azerbaijani people. Traces of Azerbaijanis are being erased from their historical and ethnic territories,” he was quoted as saying by Minval.az .

Aliyev also welcomed a decision by the Caucasus Muslim Board to establish a so-called “Qaziyat” (religious branch) in Yerevan, calling it “an important step toward restoring historical justice.”

Meanwhile, Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan stated on May 26 during the Yerevan Dialogue forum that “Western Azerbaijan” does not exist and cannot exist within the sovereign territory of Armenia.

Earlier, the Mother See of Holy Etchmiadzin denounced as absurd that the spiritual leader of a people who acquired the ethnonym 'Azerbaijani' as part of Soviet nation-building in the late 1930s would try to dispute the historicity of the Armenian people, whose millennia-old cultural and spiritual heritage is universally recognized.