Azerbaijan’s President Ilham Aliyev accused France on Tuesday in Baku of fueling a new war in the South Caucasus by supplying arms to Armenia.
“France destabilizes not only its past and present colonies but also our region, the South Caucasus, by supporting separatist tendencies and separatists,” Aliyev said in a statement to participants of an international conference in Baku.
Aliyev said that France is pursuing a “militaristic policy” by providing military assistance to Armenia, while also accusing Paris of encouraging “revanchist forces” in Armenia and laying the groundwork for “the start of new wars in the region.”
Aliyev also accused France of continuing to adopt a policy of neocolonialism and committing “most of the bloody crimes in the colonial history of humanity.”
He added that France should be “ashamed of its history of colonialism rich in bloody crimes,” but it instead talks about “fictitious ethnic cleansing in other countries” rather than “apologizing for the atrocities it has committed.”
Aliyev said Azerbaijan recently submitted its proposals for a future peace treaty with Armenia and is awaiting Yerevan’s response.
Armenia and Azerbaijan have fought two wars in the last three decades, but Aliyev elicited a resounding victory in September when he reclaimed Azerbaijan’s Karabakh area, where ethnic Armenians had enjoyed de facto independence since the early 1990s. Over 100,000 of them have migrated to Armenia since then.