Official Baku simply has no moral right to respond to the latest unrest in Turkey, said Arastun Oruclu, the head of the East-West Research Center in Baku, in response to ArmInfo's question in an on-line press conference.
The Azerbaijani authorities have not responded anyway to the latest processes in Turkey, except dispersal of protesters from the area of the Turkish Embassy in Baku. It was the first protest in front of the Turkish Embassy in Baku in the history of Azerbaijan.
"Official Baku's relations with Erdogan's government are very sensitive and a hasty response to what is happening in Turkey may break that fragile relations. Therefore, the Azerbaijani authorities refrain from any actions so far. In addition, with its big problems with human rights and freedoms, official Baku has not even a moral right to any response, I think," the expert says.
The parties will sit at a negotiating table and find a certain compromise, as the latest developments proved that stability in a country, including in Turkey, cannot be maintained via pressure on political opponents, he said. This will have no significant impact on Azerbaijan, because the political systems are quite different despite many other common factors. Oruclu believes that the unrest in Turkey is largely connected with domestic factors, as the ruling AKP has been recently ousting secular traditions of Kemalism too actively. The known arrests in the top echelons of the army, which aroused no public response, encouraged the ruling circles in Turkey to continue their course.
Asked if Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's replacement with Hassan Rouhani in Iran will make any corrections to the deteriorating Azerbaijani-Iranian relations, Oruclu said that there will be no fundamental changes as long as official Tehran perceives existence of the Azerbaijani statehood as a threat to its national security.
Joint online press conference of experts from various countries for Armenian, Azerbaijani and Georgian mass media on the relevant problems are organized within the project "Expansion of knowledge of Armenians and Azerbaijanis about each other and confidence building through first-hand information". The project of the "Region" Research Center (Armenia) and Peace and Democracy Institute (Azerbaijan) is supported by the British Embassies in Armenia and Azerbaijan.