Azerbaijan’s so-called Karabakh Liberation Organization held a meeting in Baku on June 25 to discuss the “dangerous situation regarding Karabakh’s future that has formed after the Kazan meeting.”

The resolution adopted as a result of the meeting stated that “the futility of the Kazan meeting has once again demonstrated the OSCE Minsk Group co-chair countries’ pro-Armenian position. Hence, there is no point in continuing these negotiations.”

With this document the organization is demanding that the Azeri authorities “immediately start a war against Armenia”.

Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev stated on June 26: “Armenia’s occupation of 20 percent of Azeri territories is temporary and cannot last forever. I am strongly convinced that our territorial integrity will be recovered by any means it takes. The war in Karabakh is not over yet.”

The demonstrative nature of this statement is in the fact that it was voiced right after the Kazan meeting, that is after the co-chairs stressed once again that a diplomatic settlement is the only acceptable settlement of the issue and has no alternative. The Azerbaijani president’s statement, hence, became a sort of demarche.

It is symbolic that the statement itself was voiced during a military parade in Baku held on Sunday and timed to Armed Forces Day and the 20th anniversary of Azerbaijan’s independence.

Some 6,000 servicemen took part in the parade demonstrating 400 units of military hardware and ammunition.

S-300 surface-to-air missile systems purchased from Russia, anti-mine carriers as well as modern defense technology items of Turkish, Czech and Israeli make were paraded during the review. As reported by news agencies, for the first time Azerbaijan demonstrated its unpiloted planes along with combat helicopters and fighter jets. Besides, Azeri-manufactured kinds of riffles were also demonstrated during the parade.

To sum it up: the parade was designed as a show of Azerbaijan’s military might. The Azeri president attended it in the capacity of the Commander-in-Chief, but delivered his speech as president.

“Our state budget has grown 16 times. Accordingly, our military spending has increased 20 times and mas 2,582,959,470 manats ($3.27 billion), but even that is not our limit. Today Azerbaijan’s military spending exceeds Armenia’s entire state budget by 50 percent. By their volume the military expenses will continue being a top priority in Azerbaijan’s budget until Armenia withdraws from the Azeri lands and a peace agreement is signed with this country,” Ilham Aliyev stated.

Baku is traditionally talking about its material-financial superiority over Yerevan to make a point that “Armenia is much poorer than Azerbaijan”. Still Ilham Aliyev’s late father and ex-president Heydar Aliyev used to say: “Our military budget will soon exceed Armenia’s total budget.”

In this connection Vahram Atanesyan, head of the NKR National Assembly’s Standing Committee on Foreign Affairs, says that although money is important, it is, nevertheless, not the decisive factor. “The international experience of recent years has shown that even superpowers are unable to solve their issues by force... And didn’t Artsakh [Nagorno Karabakh] manage to resist multi-million Azerbaijan back in the early 1990s?”

After the Kazan meeting other structures, too, have started to talk about the possibility of a new war. Sabine Freizer, the Europe program director of the International Crisis Group, said that the results of the trilateral meeting of the presidents (of Armenia, Russia and Azerbaijan) are disappointing, but there still remains a hope that the basic principles of the Karabakh settlement can, after all, be agreed upon.”

The problem, she believes, is that there isn’t much time left. Presidential elections will be held in the OSCE Minsk Group co-chairing countries in 2012, and in Azerbaijan and Armenia in 2013; and it would be very difficult to reach an agreement over a Karabakh settlement during the election campaign periods.

“If the negotiations on the basic principles fail, the likelihood of a new wave of armed clashes between the sides will be very high,” she says.