Edward Nalbandyan's unlucky day

Famous video portal YouTube has posted a material about the plenary session "The Great Game Revisited (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mox0_BGnjQE), on which President of Azerbaijan Ilham Aliyev, Prime Minister of Turkey Recep Tayyip Erdogan, Iranian FM Manuchokhr Mottaki and his Armenian counterpart Edward Nalbandyan, who was  23 minutes late, coming instead of Armenian President Serzh Sargsyan, who did not appear at the session, were participants.

Such kind of the unplanned replacement in the Armenian delegation was diplomatically mentioned by Jan Bremmer, who hinted on the existence of one more chair, implying that perhaps the Armenian President would come at last.

Anyway, Nalbandyan, who replaced the absent player and sat down at a chair, allocated for one more absent person Yerbol Orinbayev, appeared at the moment when President Ilham Aliyev was finishing his speech regarding the energy security. Perhaps, the fact that Nalbandyan was not lucky to hear President Ilham Aliyev's speech, explains his bewilderment and nervousness at the start of his speech. On the background of the magnificent speech of President Ilham Aliyev, the speech of the Armenian Minister seemed too weak and boring. He started from the old and boring issue of the profitability of the Armenian transit and impossibility of isolation of any country while developing and implementing of regional transport and energy projects, thus causing simmering laugh of President Ilham Aliyev. Meanwhile, the audience was yawning during the boring speech of the Armenian Foreign Minister.

The moderator touched upon the prospects of normalization of Armenian-Turkish relations and Nalbandyan and Erdogan voiced their positions on the issue, which was followed by the speech of President Aliyev. The Azerbaijan leader noted that the country maintains no relations with Armenia, as the latter occupied a significant part of the Azerbaijani territory. As for the "profitability" of the Armenian transit, Ilham Aliyev said with notes of irony that this route seems "shortest" if we see the map. But if we look at this way, standing on the real land and considering today's realities, this will turn out to be the longest route. "Our lands are now under the Armenian occupation and any cooperation is out of the question", explained the President.

Ilham Aliyev noted that Azerbaijan's position is quite clear. "We do not demand anything unusual, we just demand  from Armenia to follow the international law, execute the UN Security Council's resolutions and withdraw its troops from the Azerbaijani lands. Peace is possible only after that and all communications will be restored and all our countries may win from the great potential of the regional cooperation".

It seems that the Armenian Minister had nothing to say in protest. Perhaps, this caused the fact that until the end of the session he did not say a word. Meanwhile, the Azerbaijani President was again asked to speak about relations with Georgia. As if noting the contrast in the relations between two different neighbors in the South Caucasus, Ilham Aliyev featured the relations between Baku and Georgia as friendly and wished Georgian friends to eliminate implications of the recent armed crisis as soon as possible.

In the very end of the session moderator Jan Bremmer thanked the participants for the interesting speeches, called Nalbandyan "President Sargsyan" and wished  a good dinner to everyone.

Vugar Seidov
AzerTac