Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev received Belarusian Ambassador to Baku, Gennady Akhramovich, to rouse support for a Belarusian candidate to fill the open position of Secretary General of the Collective Security Treaty Organization (CSTO).
Two days before, Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko discussed the vacant position with Azerbaijani Ambassador, Latif Seyfaddin Ogly Gandilov, at his residence in Minsk.
The vacancy of the position comes after Yuri Khachaturov, representative of Armenia and Secretary General of CSTO, was forced to step down due to corruption charges. Armenia was set to hold the position until 2020, which is being called into question by Belarus and Azerbaijan.
Azerbaijan, however, is not a member of the CSTO.
At his meeting with the Belarusian ambassador, Aliyev claimed that “the problem of CSTO is Armenia itself.” Aliyev also spoke of the military-technical cooperation between Azerbaijan and Belarus.
“We buy military equipment in Belarus and are very satisfied with the quality and the indicators. Belarus has a very high level of military industry and we intend to continue cooperation in military-technical sphere,” Aliyev said, drawing a distinction between the military power of Armenia and Belarus. He went on to call Armenia one of the “poorest countries in the world,” while Belarus, according to him, has “developed and evolved successfully.”
During the CSTO summit in Astana, Kazakhstan on November 8, representatives of Armenia said they hope that the country will have the opportunity to nominate another Armenian official in order to complete the term. Lukashenko as well as Kazakhstan’s President, Nursultan Nazarbayev, however, demanded that a representative of Belarus be named as the Secretary General of the CSTO.
The spokesperson of Armenia’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Anna Naghdalyan, reacted to Lukashenko’s proposition to nominate a non-Armenian candidate, saying that the behavior “is not correct.”
Aliyev responded to Naghdalyan’s statement, defending his Belarusian counterpart, saying that “the behavior of the [Naghdalyan] is inappropriate.”
Russia, Armenia, Belarus, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan are members of the CSTO and they agreed in 2015 that their representatives would take turns running the organization on a rotating basis. Although Azerbaijan is not a member, Aliyev said that he is closely following the situation.
“We closely watched the CSTO summit,” the Azerbaijani leader said, adding that they “are not indifferent to the fact of who is chairing the CSTO.”
Story by Ani Paitjan
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