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Arthur Lenk: â€œAzerbaijan is the country Israel can rely onâ€

18 September 2008 14:06 (UTC +04:00)

Baku. Lachin Sultanova â€“APA. Israelâ€™s Ambassador to Azerbaijan Arthur Lenk met with the members of Womenâ€™s Media Watch, the Union of Woman Journalists of Azerbaijan. Speaking about the importance of Azerbaijan-Israel relations, the ambassador said these relations based on the five main interests â€“ welfare of Jewish community in Azerbaijan and Azerbaijanis living in Israel, energy cooperation, strategic cooperation, trade exchanging and friendly relations between Azerbaijan mostly populated by Muslims and Israel mostly populated by Jews.
The ambassador said this friendship was a message to the world. Our cooperation in the different fields, which also meet the interests of both countries, proved that opinion about the confrontation between the Islamic world and the West was wrong. The countries can have different reasons to disagree with each other, but Islam, Christianity and Judaism are not the reasonsâ€. Ambassador Lenk touched upon the strategic relations between the two countries and said that Israel and Azerbaijan were small countries located in the difficult region. â€œIn the diplomatic language it means we both have â€œmad neighborsâ€. The small countries having difficult neighbors should be very cautious and profound. Both Israel and Azerbaijan face with similar problems. Isreal well knows the situation of Azerbaijan when heard about the terrorist attack in abu Bakr Mosqueâ€.
The diplomat said Azerbaijanâ€™s help when there was concern over the safety of 500-600 Israeli citizens in Georgia at the beginning of Georgia-Russia conflict was desirable for Israel.
â€œTbilisi airport was closed on August 10-11. We were thinking how we could lead so many Israelis out of the country. Other countries, United States, Great Britain were sending their citizens to Yerevan so that they could return to their motherland. But we have no embassy in Armenia. After two or three short phone calls to Azerbaijanâ€™s Foreign Ministry and Gandja Executive Power we knew that Azerbaijan would do its best. Azerbaijan did everything, from buses sent to the Georgian border to permission given to Israeli planes to land at Baku and Gandja, so that our compatriots could leave Georgia,â€ he said.

Ambassador Lenk highly appreciated Azerbaijanâ€™s gesture of friendship.
â€œThough we did not use this help, we understood that Azerbaijan was a country Israel could rely on in hard times. So, I regard this as a small lesson we learned concerning the conflict in Georgia,â€ he said.