Azernews.Az

By Sara Rajabova

The Baku Program Coordinator of the Turkish International Cooperation and Coordination Agency (TIKA) is implementing a new project, AzerTag news agency reported.

Called "Common Karabakh Cultural Interaction", the project is aimed at studying the common culture of the people who live in Turkey's Afyonkarahisar Province and are originally from the Karabakh region in Azerbaijan and the project will popularize it in a form to feed the historically common culture.

Armenia occupied over 20 percent of Azerbaijan's internationally recognized territory, including Nagorno-Karabakh and seven adjacent regions, after laying territorial claims against its South Caucasus neighbor that caused a brutal war in the early 1990s. Long-standing efforts byUS, Russian, and French mediators have been largely fruitless so far.

As a result of the military aggression of Armenia, over 20,000 Azerbaijanis were killed, 4,866 are reported missing, almost 100,000 were injured, and 50,000 were disabled.

The UN Security Council has passed four resolutions on Armenian withdrawal from the Azerbaijani territory, but they have not been enforced to this day.

Under the "Common Karabakh Cultural Interaction" project, a symposium named "Our Karabakh" was held in Baku.

The event was addressed by Azerbaijani parliament member Ganira Pashayeva, TIKA chairman Serdar Cam, folk researcher Galib Sayilov (ANAS), and the secretary of the Bolvadin Municipality (Turkey). They spoke about the common cultural peculiarities of people who share the same origin and live in the Karabakh villages of the Bolvadin region of the Afyonkarahisar Province.

The goal of the researches is to bring these similarities to the attention of the world community, and confirm the unanimity and brotherhood of the residents on each side of the borders.

The participants recalled national leader Heydar Aliyev's saying, "One nation, two states", and once again confirmed the shared traditions and languages of these peoples.