Azerbaijan Wants Peace Talks with Armenia without Western Involvement

FILE PHOTO: Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan addresses parliament in Yerevan, Armenia, September 13, 2022. Tigran Mehrabyan/PAN Photo via REUTERS
FILE PHOTO: Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan addresses parliament in Yerevan, Armenia, September 13, 2022. Tigran Mehrabyan/PAN Photo via REUTERS
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Azerbaijan Wants Peace Talks with Armenia without Western Involvement

FILE PHOTO: Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan addresses parliament in Yerevan, Armenia, September 13, 2022. Tigran Mehrabyan/PAN Photo via REUTERS
FILE PHOTO: Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan addresses parliament in Yerevan, Armenia, September 13, 2022. Tigran Mehrabyan/PAN Photo via REUTERS

Azerbaijan wants bilateral peace talks with Armenia and believes they can reach an agreement quickly without the need for Western mediation, Azerbaijani presidential adviser Hikmet Hajiyev told Reuters on Tuesday.
"A peace agreement is not nuclear physics. If there is good will, the fundamental principles of a peace agreement can be worked out in a short time," Hajiyev said.
But on the question of Western involvement, he added: "We need peace in our region, not in Washington, Paris or Brussels."
Azerbaijan and Armenia have fought two wars in the past three decades over the territory of Karabakh, a region which is internationally recognised as part of Azerbaijan but where a majority ethnic Armenian population broke away and established de facto independence in the 1990s, Reuters said.
Azerbaijan recaptured it in September, prompting a mass exodus of almost all of the territory’s 120,000 ethnic Armenians.
Years of mediation by the European Union, the United States and Russia have failed to get Armenia and Azerbaijan to sign a peace deal. They have yet to agree on the demarcation of their shared border, which remains closed and highly militarized. Border skirmishes, often fatal, remain a regular occurrence.
Azerbaijan, which has close ties to Turkey, has in recent months repeatedly backed out of peace talks brokered by the US and the EU, both of which it has accused of pro-Armenian bias.
Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan this week credited the EU with helping to bring a peace deal closer, but said the two sides were still "speaking different diplomatic languages".
Hajiyev said the United States had shown "double standards and an unconstructive attitude". Azerbaijan has also been highly critical of France, which said last month it had agreed new contracts to supply military equipment to Armenia.
In a speech to a conference on decolonization on Tuesday, Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev said France was responsible for "most of the bloody crimes in the colonial history of humanity".



Bangladesh Protest Leaders Taken from Hospital by Police

People take part in a song march to protest against the indiscriminate killings and mass arrest in Dhaka on July 26, 2024. (AFP)
People take part in a song march to protest against the indiscriminate killings and mass arrest in Dhaka on July 26, 2024. (AFP)
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Bangladesh Protest Leaders Taken from Hospital by Police

People take part in a song march to protest against the indiscriminate killings and mass arrest in Dhaka on July 26, 2024. (AFP)
People take part in a song march to protest against the indiscriminate killings and mass arrest in Dhaka on July 26, 2024. (AFP)

Bangladeshi police detectives on Friday forced the discharge from hospital of three student protest leaders blamed for deadly unrest, taking them to an unknown location, staff told AFP.

Nahid Islam, Asif Mahmud and Abu Baker Majumder are all members of Students Against Discrimination, the group responsible for organizing this month's street rallies against civil service hiring rules.

At least 195 people were killed in the ensuing police crackdown and clashes, according to an AFP count of victims reported by police and hospitals, in some of the worst unrest of Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina's tenure.

All three were patients at a hospital in the capital Dhaka, and at least two of them said their injuries were caused by torture in earlier police custody.

"They took them from us," Gonoshasthaya hospital supervisor Anwara Begum Lucky told AFP. "The men were from the Detective Branch."

She added that she had not wanted to discharge the student leaders but police had pressured the hospital chief to do so.

Islam's elder sister Fatema Tasnim told AFP from the hospital that six plainclothes detectives had taken all three men.

The trio's student group had suspended fresh protests at the start of this week, saying they had wanted the reform of government job quotas but not "at the expense of so much blood".

The pause was due to expire earlier on Friday but the group had given no indication of its future course of action.

Islam, 26, the chief coordinator of Students Against Discrimination, told AFP from his hospital bed on Monday that he feared for his life.

He said that two days beforehand, a group of people identifying themselves as police detectives blindfolded and handcuffed him and took him to an unknown location.

Islam added that he had come to his senses the following morning on a roadside in Dhaka.

Mahmud earlier told AFP that he had also been detained by police and beaten at the height of last week's unrest.

Three senior police officers in Dhaka all denied that the trio had been taken from the hospital and into custody on Friday.

- Garment tycoon arrested -

Police told AFP on Thursday that they had arrested at least 4,000 people since the unrest began last week, including 2,500 in Dhaka.

On Friday police said they had arrested David Hasanat, the founder and chief executive of one of Bangladesh's biggest garment factory enterprises.

His Viyellatex Group employs more than 15,000 people according to its website, and its annual turnover was estimated at $400 million by the Daily Star newspaper last year.

Dhaka Metropolitan Police inspector Abu Sayed Miah said Hasanat and several others were suspected of financing the "anarchy, arson and vandalism" of last week.

Bangladesh makes around $50 billion in annual export earnings from the textile trade, which services leading global brands including H&M, Gap and others.

Student protests began this month after the reintroduction in June of a scheme reserving more than half of government jobs for certain candidates.

With around 18 million young people in Bangladesh out of work, according to government figures, the move deeply upset graduates facing an acute jobs crisis.

Critics say the quota is used to stack public jobs with loyalists to Hasina's Awami League.

- 'Call to the nation' -

The Supreme Court cut the number of reserved jobs on Sunday but fell short of protesters' demands to scrap the quotas entirely.

Hasina has ruled Bangladesh since 2009 and won her fourth consecutive election in January after a vote without genuine opposition.

Her government is also accused by rights groups of misusing state institutions to entrench its hold on power and stamp out dissent, including the extrajudicial killing of opposition activists.

Hasina continued a tour of government buildings that had been ransacked by protesters, on Friday visiting state broadcaster Bangladesh Television, which was partly set ablaze last week.

"Find those who were involved in this," she said, according to state news agency BSS.

"Cooperate with us to ensure their punishment. I am making this call to the nation."