Dear friends,
On May 28, 1918 the National Council of Azerbaijan stated the declaration of independence of the Azerbaijan Democratic Republic (ADR) in the Trans- Caucasian Congress. Right after the foundation of the first independent state in the East, National Council of Azerbaijan sent telegrams to the world states on the sovereignty of the country. The first country that showed interest on building bilateral diplomatic relations between the countries was the ancestor of the Turkish Republic Ottoman Empire who also noted its commitment to support the newly established state by all means. Ottoman Empire played a great role in the emancipation of Baku from occupation, development of ADR as a state in military and economic terms. An obvious proof of it was the contract on “Mutual military assistance” signed on June 4, 1919.
However during the First World War, defeat of the fours’ alliance to which Ottoman Empire also was a party threw existence of ADR in danger. However Azerbaijan Democratic Republic was de-facto recognized by Paris Peace Conference on January 11, 1920 thanks to flexibility of young Azerbaijan diplomacy. Unfortunately political processes happening at that time didn’t let ADR to maintain its functioning for more than 23 months. On the 28th of April in 1920 XI Red Army of Russia put an end to the existence of ADR and Azerbaijan became one of the states under the Soviet Union during the course of 70 years.
On October 18, 1991, 70 years later Azerbaijan again announced its state sovereignty. On November 12, 1995 The Constitution of the Azerbaijan Republic was accepted. The Constitution declared the official language of the Republic of Azerbaijan to be the Azerbaijani language, the state structure to be a Democratic and Unitary Republic.
The first republic to recognize the Sovereignty of the Azerbaijan Republic was the Republic of Turkey who in 1992 opened its Embassy to Azerbaijan. In the same year Azerbaijani Embassy was opened in Ankara, General-Consulate commenced on action in Istanbul. In 2004 General-Consulate of the Azerbaijan Republic to Gars was opened. Turkey at present is the only country where the Azerbaijan Republic is represented in 3 diplomatic missions.
Azerbaijan has always been in the center of interest of both neighboring states and big states of the world with its strategic placement in geopolitical term. Therefore our people have always undergone disasters throughout the history and our lands have been occupied by different invaders. Recent occupation of 20% of Azeri lands by Armenian dashnaks, and displacement of one million people to become refugees and IDPs is the logical continuation of ethnic purification policy against Azerbaijani population in Caucasus since two centuries period. However out nation managed to preserve their religion, language, culture, national heritage and traditions despite the attacks and invasions.
Nowadays Azerbaijan makes firm steps in integrating to the world and becoming one of the strong states in the world arena by keeping faith to the policy founded by National Leader Haydar Aliyev and maintained by the decent successor of this policy, the president Ilham Aliyev. The country moves forward with accelerated economic development. After gaining independence Azerbaijan under the leadership of National Leader Haydar Aliyev joined to the Contract of the Century and took the realization of huge oil projects such as Baku–Tbilisi–Ceyhan, Baku–Supsa pipelines projects.
At the end, I want to stress that our National Leader Haydar Aliyev put significant value to the multilateral relations between Azerbaijan and Turkey, and made stable efforts to improve mutual relations and cooperation between the two brother states calling them “One nation two states”.
Dear Friends, in order to improve information exchange as well as increase flow of information between the two states, to obtain fair dissemination of realities of our country in your areas, to get you familiar with political, economic and cultural development in the country closer we developed the website of General-Consulate of the Azerbaiian Republic in Istanbul
Welcome to our website.