16/10/2013 13:09
«The Americans suggested we gave 25% of votes in favour of Jamil Hasanli»
As reported by the Azerbaijani news agency APA, the Head of the Administration of the President of Azerbaijan Ramiz Mehdiyev made the following sensational announcement, “The US officials advised us to give 25% of electoral votes to the representative of the National Council, while only 74-75% votes to our candidate, suggesting that this ratio of votes would supposedly allow the Department of State to give a balanced assessment of the election results. Logically, if we didn’t heed that advice, then in all other cases the assessment would surely be negative. The result is well known. As we can see, this was not just friendly advice, but a strict warning.”
The head of the President’s Administration asserted his tough attitude towards the stance of the West concerning the presidential elections in Azerbaijan. “It turns out that we were supposed to have conducted not free and fare but fictitious elections; moreover, based on the desire of our partners we were supposed to artificially add percentages to certain presidential candidates. Isn’t this but an insult to the national dignity of the Azerbaijani electorate who by their own will, without any external interventions, determine which political power to vote for?”
In his interview given to a group of state media channels, Ramiz Mehdiyev accused the United States in the violation of human rights and said, “One has to ask, given these and other serious problems concerning the rights of the US citizens, wouldn’t it be better for the US government first to settle the matters in their country and only then teach other states how they should live?”
According to Mehdiyev, for a number of foreign centres the practice of criticizing Azerbaijan has become an end in itself: “As a rule the American establishment permanently supports the Armenian stance in the context of the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict, provides aid to Armenia and Nagorno-Karabakh through non-governmental channels, unblocking problems concerning human rights violations; it also deliberately conducts a destructive policy regarding the lifting of the 907 amendment to the Freedom Support Act, which infringes on the national interests of Azerbaijan,” he said.
The head of Aliyev administration also expressed his attitude towards the scandalous report by the OSCE ODIHR, “According to our data the report on the presidential elections, which does not contain a single positive fragment, had been prepared in advance in the Warsaw office of that organization. Here we should say that these kinds of tricks aim to escalate the situation and to incite negative processes in the Azerbaijani society. Thus it can be concluded from all this that some observers had in advance been prepared to give negative assessment to the elections in Azerbaijan and we can only guess what the real goal of these explicitly hostile sentiments is.”
Ramiz Mehdiyev also blamed the US government in patronizing the OSCE ODIHR. “This institution is far from being an independent organization to function on its own. OSCE always heeds the US. Recalling that this organization had previously given a non-objective and partial assessment to the elections in Azerbaijan and was functioning according to specially received instructions, we were not at all thinking of inviting them to observe the presidential elections. However, the Azerbaijani side did invite OSCE ODIHR heeding the advice of the US. The reports issued by the US State Department and by the OSCE ODIHR in fact turned out to be identical. This is the very instance of a blatant abuse of trust,” said Mehdiyev.