President of Azerbaijan Ilham Aliyev opened a forum on dialogue by explaining why 28 years of negotiations produced nothing, and warned that any attempt to impose someone else's will on Baku again would meet a resolute response. Guests from 100 countries were invited to draw their own conclusions.
The morning of October 27, 2026, was a nervous one for the world. Polling stations opened in Israel for Knesset elections. A war of attrition continued around the Strait of Hormuz, and a barrel of Azeri Light, CIF Augusta, climbed to $127.60. At the same hours in Baku, the 7th World Forum on Intercultural Dialogue was getting underway: 500 foreign guests from 100 countries, three days of discussions under the theme "Dialogue for a Shared Future: Building Bridges in a Divided World."
The forum's host opened with a paradox. President of Azerbaijan Ilham Aliyev told an audience gathered to talk about dialogue how dialogue had worked against his country for nearly three decades. The negotiating format, he said, had been designed not to resolve the conflict but to keep it frozen. "Apparently, the great powers of the world reached a consensus on this. Nevertheless, they miscalculated the plans and intentions of the Azerbaijani people and government. As an occupied country, we would never have accepted the violation of our people's most basic rights, and they should have known that," the head of state said.
Then came the line that Baku has already turned into headlines: groundless notions that anyone can dictate anything to us will continue to run up against our resolute position.
This was not the diplomatic courtesy of a conference host. It was a doctrine.
The Consensus That Lost: How the Great Powers Kept Karabakh in the Freezer for 28 Years
The Minsk Group was born in March 1992 by decision of the CSCE Council of Ministers in Helsinki. From 1997, it was led by a trio of co-chairs: Russia, the United States, and France. Three permanent members of the UN Security Council, three nuclear powers, three states with interests of their own in the region. Formally, they were tasked with bringing the parties to peace. In practice, for nearly three decades they managed the status quo.
The figures of that era are known to every Azerbaijani. Around 20 percent of the country's territory fell under occupation: the former Nagorno-Karabakh Autonomous Oblast and seven adjacent districts. According to official data, roughly one million people became refugees and internally displaced persons. Between April and November 1993, the Security Council adopted four resolutions: 822, 853, 874, and 884. Each demanded the withdrawal of occupying forces from Azerbaijani lands. Not one was implemented.
President of Azerbaijan Ilham Aliyev recalled this without emotion: the 1993 resolutions "remained only on paper." Behind that formula lies the fact most essential to understanding the entire speech. Azerbaijan always had international law on its side. What it lacked was a mechanism to make that law work.
The mediators offered Baku the Madrid Principles of 2007 one moment and interim framework documents the next. In June 2011 in Kazan, under the auspices of then Russian President Dmitry Medvedev, the parties came closer to a document than ever before, only to walk away empty-handed. On August 5, 2019, Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan, speaking in Khankendi, declared that Karabakh is Armenia, period. After that line, the negotiating process in its old format was over de facto, though the co-chairs spent another year pretending that everything was going according to plan.
This is where the fault line the head of state spoke of runs. The great powers were counting on Azerbaijan to resign itself to the situation. Resignation looked rational: the frozen conflict troubled no one in Washington, Moscow, or Paris, oil and gas flowed west, and the losses were borne by refugees in tent camps near Barda and Bilasuvar. The mistake lay in one thing alone: the assessment of will. For more than twenty years Baku built its economy, its army, and its coalitions, and then exercised the right that the UN Charter guarantees to every state.
"We saw that the negotiations were leading nowhere, and we decided to make our own efforts. Relying on the UN Charter, on its Article 51, that is, the right to self-defense, we defeated the enemy, liberated our lands that had been under occupation for years, and thereby restored international law. With our own forces, we ensured the implementation of the 1993 UN Security Council resolutions," the President recalled.
The Second Karabakh War lasted 44 days, from September 27 to November 10, 2020. The one-day counterterrorism measures of September 19 and 20, 2023, brought matters to a close. On October 15 of that year, President of Azerbaijan Ilham Aliyev raised the national flag in Khankendi. The Minsk Group outlived the conflict itself by almost two years: the OSCE decided to close it only on September 1, 2025, and the procedure was completed by December 1. A structure created to achieve a settlement passed into history when there was nothing left to settle.
Why a Peace Forum Opens With a Story About War
A skeptic might ask whether a forum on intercultural dialogue is the right place to talk about victory over an enemy. The answer lies in the history of the Baku Process itself.
President of Azerbaijan Ilham Aliyev launched it in December 2008, when representatives of member states of the Organization of Islamic Cooperation were invited to a conference of culture ministers of Council of Europe member states held in Baku. A year later, in 2009, when Baku held the title of Capital of Islamic Culture, the format was mirrored: Europeans were invited to a meeting of OIC culture ministers. No other capital had ever brought these two audiences to the same table on a regular basis.
The first World Forum on Intercultural Dialogue took place April 7 to 9, 2011. Forums followed in 2013, 2015, 2017, and 2019. The pandemic broke the two-year cycle, and the sixth forum was held only on May 1 to 3, 2024. The current, seventh forum coincides with the platform's 15th anniversary. The UN General Assembly has recognized the Baku Process in its resolutions as one of the leading global platforms for intercultural engagement, and the forum's partners traditionally include UNESCO, the UN Alliance of Civilizations, the UN World Tourism Organization, and ICESCO. On the eve of the opening, the head of state received the High Representative for the Alliance of Civilizations.
"Over these years, the World Forum on Intercultural Dialogue has truly become one of the most effective and inclusive platforms for discussing issues of intercultural relations, and not only those," the President said, thanking the UN for supporting the initiative.
Note the chronology. Baku offered the world dialogue in 2008, 2011, 2013, 2015, 2017, and 2019, all the while remaining a state with a fifth of its territory under occupation. For years, Azerbaijan invited to its platforms people from countries whose governments provided diplomatic cover for the status quo. Patience was not weakness but strategy. And when it became clear that dialogue had been turned into a tool for preserving injustice, Baku exercised its right to self-defense, then returned to the same agenda, this time from a position of restored sovereignty.
This is the central thesis of the October 27 speech. Dialogue makes sense only between equals. A state whose land has been taken can take part in negotiations indefinitely, but it cannot be an equal party to them. Azerbaijan has restored that equality and is now entitled to speak about bridges without the caveat of occupation.
In recent years, Baku's international standing has grown far beyond its region. From 2019 to 2023, Azerbaijan chaired the Non-Aligned Movement, a grouping of 120 states. In November 2024, Baku hosted COP29, the planet's largest climate conference. The President summed it up briefly: the country has succeeded in establishing itself as a reliable member of the international community. The forum on dialogue is a natural continuation of that course, not a gesture of politeness.
An Iron Fist Without Ethnicity: Who Really Fought for Karabakh
The most powerful part of the speech concerned not diplomacy but society. During the Armenian aggression and occupation, including the Second Karabakh War, the head of state said, representatives of all ethnic groups and religions fought as a single iron fist.
Behind that phrase are names. Albert Agarunov, a Mountain Jew and tank commander, was killed on May 8, 1992, in Shusha. He was 23 years old. He was posthumously named a National Hero of Azerbaijan and is buried in the Alley of Martyrs in Baku, alongside Azerbaijanis, Lezgins, Talysh, and Russians. There were hundreds of such stories in the first war and thousands in the second.
"We lived under different systems. Nevertheless, no system could overpower our national feelings, our strength. After restoring its independence, Azerbaijan became the master of its own destiny," the President said.
Multiculturalism, Azerbaijani style, is not a slogan from a manual. Article 18 of the Constitution separates religion from the state and proclaims the equality of all faiths before the law. In the Guba district stands Qirmizi Qasaba, one of the largest compact settlements of Mountain Jews in the world outside Israel. The village of Nij in the Gabala district is home to the Udins, heirs of the Caucasian Albanians, who have preserved their working churches. The Orthodox Diocese of Baku, a Catholic parish, a Lutheran church, Ashkenazi and Mountain Jewish synagogues: this entire map fits within a single city. Popes have visited Baku twice: John Paul II in May 2002 and Francis on October 2, 2016. For a Muslim-majority country, that says more than any declaration.
The head of state called things by their proper names: representatives of all ethnic groups and religions have equal rights under the Constitution and at the same time live as one family. "We all unite around national ideas. Azerbaijanism, as they say, brings together all the peoples of Azerbaijan. This unity has manifested itself in the most difficult periods of our history of independence," the President noted.
The contrast with the neighboring country is too stark to overlook. According to the 2011 census, Armenians made up about 98 percent of Armenia's population. Ethnic homogeneity there was the result of deliberate policy. In 1988 and 1989, Azerbaijanis were expelled from Armenia: between 200,000 and 250,000 people, by various estimates. One country built its state on exclusion, the other on inclusion. The outcome of the 2020 war is explained in large part by precisely this difference: a fist is clenched by all the fingers, not one.
Not a Single Foreign Dollar: What Lies Behind the Line About 35 Years
Another of the President's statements went almost unnoticed in the news feeds, though it deserves a closer look. The country's achievements over 35 years, the head of state said, were earned by the Azerbaijani people, and Azerbaijan received no international assistance. The country went from destruction, occupation, and widespread poverty to development and success.
Azerbaijan marked the 35th anniversary of the restoration of its independence on October 18, nine days before the forum. The starting point is well known: in the early 1990s, the economy lay in ruins, war raged in the west of the country, and on October 24, 1992, the U.S. Congress passed the Freedom Support Act with its notorious Section 907. It banned direct U.S. government assistance to Baku. In those same years, Armenia was among the largest per capita recipients of American aid anywhere in the post-Soviet space. Section 907 began to be suspended by presidential waiver only in 2002, after the September 11 attacks, when Washington needed Azerbaijani transit routes to Afghanistan.
Azerbaijan had to rely on its own resources and its own diplomacy. On September 20, 1994, Heydar Aliyev signed the Contract of the Century with an international oil consortium. In 2006, the Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan oil pipeline came online. The last day of 2020 was the day gas began flowing to Europe through the Trans Adriatic Pipeline, completing the Southern Gas Corridor. Today, several European Union member states receive Azerbaijani gas, and Brussels officially calls Baku a reliable energy partner.
According to official statistics, the poverty rate has fallen from nearly half the population in the early 2000s to roughly 5 to 6 percent. The reconstruction of the liberated territories is financed from the state budget, with billions of manats allocated for this purpose every year. Fuzuli Airport received its first flight on September 5, 2021, and was formally inaugurated on October 26 of that year. An airport in Zangilan followed. In July 2022, the first families returned to the village of Aghaly in the Zangilan district, launching the Great Return. Today, tens of thousands of people already live in the liberated districts.
Compare this with postwar reconstructions that are financed for decades through donor conferences. Azerbaijan is rebuilding territory that the occupiers turned into a wasteland without a single donor marathon. The line about 35 years without outside help is addressed to those who are used to thinking that the right to an opinion in the post-Soviet space is bought with loans and grants. In Baku, that commodity is not for sale.
Is an Ideological Threat More Dangerous Than a Shell? Who the Warning Is Aimed At
The most politically significant formula came toward the middle of the speech. "We have no internal risks. All potential risks come from beyond our borders," the President said. He added that ideological risks are no less dangerous than physical ones, and that society must therefore remain vigilant and fully determined to defend its national identity, statehood, independence, and way of life. According to the head of state, Azerbaijani society today demonstrates unity on every issue.
The list of addressees is easy to guess. In January 2024, the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe refused to ratify the credentials of the Azerbaijani delegation, after which Baku ended its participation in the assembly's work. The European Parliament has for years churned out resolutions whose authors, judging by the text, have never looked at a map of the South Caucasus. In August 2026, Azerbaijan filed suit against CNN in federal court in Delaware over a June 5 report that Baku considered defamatory. The Russian media environment has also provided grounds: in 2026, several of its prominent figures were placed on Azerbaijan's wanted list over publications deemed hostile.
Relations with Moscow are a chapter of their own. On December 25, 2024, an AZAL aircraft flying from Baku to Grozny was struck over Russian territory and crashed near Aktau. Thirty-eight people were killed. Baku demanded an admission of responsibility, punishment of those responsible, and compensation, and did not budge an inch despite serious pressure. In the summer of 2025, after two Azerbaijanis died during detention in Yekaterinburg, relations sank to their lowest point in the entire post-Soviet period. The admission came in October 2025 in Dushanbe, at a meeting of the two presidents. Baku's logic worked: firmness proved more profitable than compliance.
This is exactly what President of Azerbaijan Ilham Aliyev meant when he warned that attempts to dictate their will to the country would meet a resolute response. This is not about any particular capital. The point is the principle: Azerbaijan does not accept external management, whether in the form of an ultimatum, a resolution, or a media campaign.
The formula about ideological risks deserves special attention. A state that has lived through occupation knows that war begins with text. The Karabakh conflict of 1988 grew out of historical claims that had matured for years in Armenian journalism and academia before spilling into the streets. Today the tools are different, including social media algorithms, synthetic videos, and networks of anonymous channels, but the mechanism is the same. It is no coincidence that the agenda of a forum with dedicated sessions on media, trust, and artificial intelligence aligns with the head of state's chief concern.
Double Standards: Baku Presents the Bill
"The policy of double standards must be completely eradicated from international politics," the President declared. He said it at a forum where the hall was filled with representatives of most of the very powers that applied those standards.
Azerbaijan's bill was presented long ago, and it is well documented. Four Security Council resolutions in 1993 without a single sanction against the occupier. Not one embargo, not one frozen account, not one tribunal. By comparison, in other conflicts the West imposed sanctions packages within a matter of weeks, and the Security Council managed to find enforcement mechanisms when the interests of its permanent members required it. Territorial integrity was declared sacred in some cases and a bargaining chip in others.
The same standards are evident on the question of cultural heritage. The city of Aghdam, home to tens of thousands of people before the occupation, was dismantled for building materials and reduced to ruins that foreign journalists called the Hiroshima of the Caucasus. The occupiers used Aghdam's Juma Mosque, built in 1868 to 1870, as a livestock barn. According to the Azerbaijani side, the overwhelming majority of the 67 mosques in the occupied territories were destroyed or desecrated. Over 27 years of occupation, Western parliaments adopted nothing on the matter comparable to the flood of statements that descended on Baku after 2020 concerning the Christian churches of Karabakh.
Meanwhile, in the center of Baku stands the Armenian Church of St. Gregory the Illuminator. It was not blown up during the war years; it was preserved, and within its walls is a library of Armenian books that the head of state has repeatedly mentioned to foreign interlocutors. Baku restored the Orthodox Church of the Archangel Michael and supports Udin churches and synagogues. Azerbaijan demonstrates in practice what it is urged to do in words. Those doing the urging, however, do not hold themselves to their own standards.
The agenda of this year's forum includes the protection of cultural heritage and collective memory as part of international security. For Azerbaijan, this is not an abstraction. A destroyed monument is a severed link between a people and its own history, and the restoration of the mosques of Aghdam, Fuzuli, and Zangilan is just as much a part of the peace process as demining and road building.
Pashinyan Counts to 2031: Why Baku Is in No Hurry to Sign
"We have created a completely new situation in the South Caucasus," the President said. The phrase is precise. The new region was born on August 8, 2025, in Washington, when President of Azerbaijan Ilham Aliyev and Nikol Pashinyan, in the presence of Donald Trump, initialed the text of the agreement on the establishment of peace and interstate relations and signed a joint declaration. That same meeting set out the framework for the Trump Route for International Peace and Prosperity, a transport corridor through Zangezur that will connect mainland Azerbaijan with Nakhchivan.
Much has happened since then. Azerbaijani fuel began flowing into Armenia. Baku lifted restrictions on cargo transit bound for Armenia. The border ceased to be a front line. Yet there is still no signature on the treaty, and the reason is well known: the preamble of Armenia's Constitution refers to the 1990 Declaration of Independence, which in turn refers to the 1989 decision on the so-called reunification with Karabakh. Baku has consistently and justifiably demanded that the territorial claim be removed from the fundamental law before signing. Peace on paper while the claim remains in the constitution is the same freeze, just in new packaging.
Domestic Armenian politics decides everything here. In the June 7, 2026, elections, Pashinyan's Civil Contract won 49.75 percent of the vote and 64 of 105 seats. Billionaire Samvel Karapetyan's Strong Armenia bloc took 23.3 percent and 29 seats, and Robert Kocharyan's Armenia bloc about 10 percent and 12 seats. Nearly a third of Armenian voters backed forces that view the peace agenda skeptically at best. The ruling party lacks a two-thirds constitutional majority, and amending the fundamental law requires a referendum.
From there begins an arithmetic that sounds less and less confident coming out of Yerevan. On October 15, Pashinyan told a government meeting that his goal was to sign and ratify the treaty before 2031. A week later, on October 22, he corrected himself: signing is possible in 2027 or 2028, and there are no plans to put it off until 2031. Two dates in seven days is a spread that says a great deal about how confident the Armenian prime minister is in his own electorate.
Baku's position, meanwhile, has not changed by so much as a comma. Azerbaijan is ready to sign the document, whose text was finalized back on March 13, 2025, as soon as the territorial claim disappears from Armenia's Constitution. Baku has no need to rush: time is on the side of the party that already controls its territory, is rebuilding it, and is shaping the region's transport architecture. It is in this context that the words about the futility of dictating to Azerbaijan should be read. Attempts to speed up the signing through outside pressure while sidestepping the constitutional question are doomed.
My forecast is as follows. The peace treaty will not be signed before December 31, 2026. A constitutional referendum in Armenia, if Pashinyan's government dares to hold one, will take place no earlier than the second half of 2027. A signature on the treaty will appear no earlier than 2028, and only if the vote succeeds. Throughout this period, Azerbaijan will deepen its economic presence in the region, and by the time of signing, the treaty will merely codify a reality that has already taken shape.
A Field Trip More Persuasive Than a Plenary Session
The forum program includes a trip for participants to the liberated territories on October 29. The detail may seem a matter of protocol, but it encapsulates Azerbaijan's entire communications strategy. In 2024, guests of the sixth forum had already traveled to Karabakh. Now new ones will come: diplomats, religious leaders, researchers, and journalists.
They will be shown what no presentation can convey. The rebuilt neighborhoods of Fuzuli and Shusha. The runways of new airports. Roads that did not exist before 2020. Mine warning signs along the roadsides: according to Azerbaijani estimates, up to one and a half million mines were laid in the liberated territories, and hundreds of people have already fallen victim to them since the war ended. A foreigner who has seen the ruins of Aghdam with his own eyes is unlikely to believe a resolution that calls Azerbaijan the aggressor.
In 2023, Shusha held the title of Cultural Capital of the Turkic World. Its return to life is the clearest answer to the question of what Azerbaijan is doing with its liberated land. Here Baku needs no intermediaries or interpreters: the picture speaks for itself.
A Voice No Longer Delegated
If the October 27 speech were reduced to a single idea, it would be this: Azerbaijan no longer authorizes anyone to speak on its behalf. Not the Minsk Group, not the Council of Europe, not the great powers that once agreed among themselves on a freeze. President of Azerbaijan Ilham Aliyev listed the sources of this independence: an economy built without other people's money, an army that liberated the land without other people's soldiers, a society in which a Mountain Jew and an Azerbaijani rest in the same alley, and a diplomacy that kept the door open to dialogue even when its interlocutors kept theirs shut.
Who gains from this position? First and foremost, Azerbaijan itself, which has gained freedom to maneuver among Washington, Brussels, Moscow, Ankara, and the capitals of the Global South. The region gains, having for the first time in three decades a chance at open borders and functioning transport links. The losers are those accustomed to managing the South Caucasus through frozen conflicts, and those in Armenia who are still living in the 1990s.
One question remains that has no answer yet, even in Yerevan: will Armenian society find the courage to vote for a constitution without claims against its neighbor?
Baku's response will depend on that vote less than is commonly thought. Azerbaijan has traveled its part of the road.
From the hall where the President spoke of the iron fist to the Alley of Martyrs is a drive of a few minutes across the city. There, in the upland part of Baku, under one sky, lie Albert Agarunov, killed in Shusha at 23, and hundreds of his comrades with Azerbaijani, Lezgin, Russian, and Talysh surnames. Guests from 100 countries can spend three days in panel discussions about bridges in a divided world. The shortest route to understanding Azerbaijan runs through this alley.