Azerbaijan

"About 1,000 of Khojaly`s 10,000 people were massacred by the Armenian Army in Tuesdays attack. Azerbaijani television showed truckloads of corpses being evacuated from the Khocaly area."

"Two groups, apparently families, had fallen together, the children cradled in the women’s arms. Several of them, including one small girl, had terrible head injuries: only her face was left. Survivors have told how they saw Armenians shooting them point blank as they lay on the ground."

"At about 11:00 p.m. the night before, some 2,000 Armenian fighters had advanced through the high grass on three sides of Khojalu, forcing the residents out through the open side to the east. By the morning of February 26, the refugees had made it to the eastern cusp of Mountainous Karabagh and had begun working their way downhill, toward safety in the Azeri city of Agdam, about six miles away. There, in the hillocks and within sight of safety, Mountainous Karabagh soldiers had chased them down. "They just shot and shot and shot, " a refugee woman, Raisha Aslanova, testified to a Human Rights Watch investigator. The Arabo fighters had then unsheathed the knives they had carried on their hips for so long, and began stabbing."

"Before Khojali, the Azerbaijanis thought that they were joking with us, they thought that the Armenians were people who could not raise their hand against the civilian population. We were able to break that stereotype."

"The event in Khojaly was organized by the political opponents to force my resignation. I found it doubtful that the Armenians would have allowed the Azerbaijanis to collect the bodies had the allegations of a massacre been true."

"The city and its inhabitants were deliberately sacrificed to the political goal – to prevent the People Front of Azerbaijan from coming to power."

"I am well aware of who had the Khojaly tragedy on their conscience. And it was not the Armenian side."

"The tragedy was realized by the authorities of Azerbaijan, and concretely – somebody of those high standing."

"January events of 1990 in Baku and events in Khojalu were the handwork of the same people."

"In reality, the Khojali tragedy is one of the greatest human atrocities of the 20th century. Every effort must be made to seek the world community's unbiased and resolute position regarding this genocide."

"Azerbaijan! Azerbaijan!"

"Important projects initiated by Azerbaijan are being carried out in order to meet the energy demand not only of the region, but also the European continent, The country is absolutely independent in this area,” the minister said. “We even sell energy and the energy carriers to other countries. At the same time, Azerbaijan, thanks to the reforms held, is reducing its dependence on oil, and the country’s economy will develop in the future as well."

"A Formula One race will improve our country's image. When we took an obligation to host this event two years ago, we could not forecast such a sharp decline in the oil price"

"I refuse to think of Azeris as inauthentically Muslims or semi-Muslims. Even following 73 years of secular Soviet rule They are Muslim and proud."

"By mid-1921, the Red Army had overcome opposition in the Caucasus and Central Asia, although its invasion of Poland in 1920 was driven back. These conflicts were linked to rivalry between the great powers. The conflict in the Caucasus was in part an instance of the struggle between Britain and the Soviet Union. The British saw Armenia, Azerbaijan and Georgia, each of which briefly became independent in the Russian Civil War, as a buffer for their interests in Iraq, Persia (Iran) and India; and as a source of raw materials, notably oil from Azerbaijan and access to oil from Georgia. In late 1918, the British landed troops in the Black Sea port of Batumi, the terminus of the railway to the oil-producing centre of Baku on the Caspian Sea. This was a commitment advocated by Mackinder. Torpedo-armed coastal motor boats were sent overland to the Caspian Sea. However, under pressure from too many commitments, the British withdrew their forces from late 1919. Benefiting from the divisions between the Caucasus republics, the Soviets advanced and took them over in 1920–1."

"While separatist nationalisms developed and were increasingly expressed, there was no protracted attempt to use the extensive military resources of the Soviet state to prevent the collapse of the Soviet Union. Already, in 1986–7, the government had refused to employ force to support party leaders in the Baltic Republics. When the crisis rose to a height, counterreform attempts by the Soviet military, keen to preserve the integrity of the state, led to action against nationalists in Georgia (1989), Azerbaijan (1990), Lithuania (1991), Latvia (1991), and Moldova (1992). However, these steps were small-scale, and there was no significant violent supporting action by the 25 million Russians living within the Soviet Union but outside Russia, those, for example, who played a key role in crises in Crimea and eastern Ukraine in 2014."

"Most narratives about the end of the Soviet Union focus on Baltic, Georgian and Ukrainian activism, but there is a powerful case to be made that the USSR died on the streets of Baku in January 1990 when Moscow dispatched units of the Soviet military to put down the aspirations of the Azerbaijani people for freedom and independence."

"Tehran’s Center for the Study of Iran and Eurasia says that plans approved by the leaders of Azerbaijan and Iran in Tashkent a week ago to open a corridor via Iranian territory between Azerbaijan and Nakhchivan represent “a strategic breakthrough” for both countries."

"What American politicians fail to understand (or at least it seems to me) is that today's Azerbaijan is quite a different place than the chaotic, war-torn, nearly failed state that the United States dealt with in its early years of independence."

"For the past 10-15 years, the number of protected areas, national parks and nature reserves have increased dramatically in the country. Some years ago, the residents of the regions killed wild animals to protect their livestock from predators. To protect the wild nature the government pays compensation to residents who suffered losses, with the condition that they will not kill wild animals any more. For the past 4-5 years the government have conducted several projects on modernization and reconstruction of water mains and sewer lines in rural areas located on the banks of these rivers. Special equipment cleans waste waters, and sewage water do not dump directly into these rivers"

"We hope these tensions won't do a major damage to relations between the regional countries [referring to Turkey]. We also maintain very close relations with Russia and hence we'll do everything in our power to tap a way out of this crisis"

"The European companies are operating here to demonstrate their experience that Azerbaijan could use in practice. Azerbaijan and the EU enjoy very close relations that develop from year to year. We hope to get Azerbaijani gas in 2020. Moreover, according to available information, the implementation of TANAP project is ahead of schedule."

"You have a beautiful country, beautiful people. I witnessed this during my visit to Azerbaijan."

"Although there was peaceful abandonment of communism in most states of the former Soviet Union, some terrible exceptions occurred. Russian and Moldovan elites fought for supremacy in Moldova (which had dropped its Soviet name of Moldavia). Tribal and religious rivalries produced a vicious civil war in Tajikistan on the Afghan border. Chechnya rose in revolt against the Russian Federation. A bloody war sputtered on between Armenia and Azerbaijan about the Armenian-inhabited enclave in Karabagh. But it could have been so much worse and most of the countries of the former USSR at least achieved independence without bloodshed."

"Although cooperation between Latvia and Azerbaijan has deepened in recent years, I consider that there is still huge potential for the further expansion of our relations, especially in political, economic, and cultural areas,"

"Balıqçının toruna düşən hər bir canlı onun üçün balıqdır."

"Döyüşdə və sevgide hamı bərabər."

"Nahardan sonra bir qədər əlləş, şamdan sonrasa bir qədər əyləş."

"Tələsən təndirə düşər."

"A real Rutulian man is one who catches a wolf with his bare hands (from Rutulian folklore). (Musaev G. "Рутулы" (1997))"