Aliyev Links Zangezur Corridor Issue to 1920 Sovietization of Azerbaijan

In an August 26 interview, answering a question from Al Arabiya about the so-called “Trump Route,” the Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev said he had to “dig into history” to explain why Azerbaijan was divided in the first place, Orda.kz reports.

This happened in the first months of the Sovietization of Azerbaijan. After the collapse of the Russian Empire in 1917, the Azerbaijan Democratic Republic was created. It was the first democratic republic in the Muslim world, founded in May 1918. It lasted until April 1920, when the Russian army invaded Azerbaijan and occupied the country. The Bolsheviks who carried out the 1917 revolution deceived the people. Their slogans were: ‘factories and plants to workers, land to peasants, freedom to nations.’ We created our own state, but the Bolsheviks took it from us. In April 1920, the Russian army invaded Azerbaijan and occupied it. In November of that same year, just a few months later, the Soviet government decided to take Zangezur — what we call Western Zangezur — away from Azerbaijan and hand it over to Armenia,  Aliyev said in an interview with Al Arabiya, cited by Azerbaijan’s state news agency AZERTAC.

On August 8, Armenia and Azerbaijan signed a U.S.-brokered peace deal that includes building a transit corridor between Azerbaijan and Nakhchivan, separated by a 32-kilometer strip of Armenian territory.

Under the agreement, exclusive development rights to the corridor for 99 years go to the United States.

The project has been dubbed the “Trump Route.”

Bilateral ties between Azerbaijan and Russia have been notably deteriorating. More can be read here.