Turkey & Azerbaijan: What Wikileaks?
The the post-Wikileaks era was supposed to be that was all about greater transparency and governments being consistent in what they say, Turkey and Azerbaijan are having none of it. Despite some of the leaked Wikileaks cables containing material that depicts Azeri President Ilham Aliyev harshly criticizing the Turks, calling their foreign policy "naive" and their initiatives a "failure," the two countries are keeping up the public appearance that it's business as usual between them. From a report Today's Zaman:
President Abdullah Gül had his first bilateral talks on Wednesday in Astana with his Azerbaijani counterpart, Ilham Aliyev, who was reported to have voiced remarks critical of the current Turkish government in US diplomatic cables released recently by WikiLeaks, a whistleblower website.Following the release of a large number of sensitive US diplomatic cables by the WikiLeaks anti-secrecy website, Gül met with Aliyev on the sidelines of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) summit in Kazakhstan's capital of Astana, where both discussed the currently stalled Nagorno-Karabakh conflict, a territorial dispute between Azerbaijan and Armenia.
Speaking to a group of Turkish journalists on the sidelines of the summit in Astana, Gül said Aliyev denied the report during their meeting. Gül said Aliyev expressed his dismay over the cables presenting him as being critical of Erdoğan. “He denied the veracity of the documents and expressed his sadness,” Gül said........"I told him not to be sad. Even if you hadn't said they weren't true, we did not believe them anyway,” Gül noted.
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