BAKU, Azerbaijan, September 20. Rwanda has also supported most of our initiatives aimed at strengthening solidarity within the Non-Aligned Movement and joined them, President of Azerbaijan Ilham Aliyev said during a joint press statement with President of Rwanda Paul Kagame, Trend reports.
Statement by President Ilham Aliyev
- Dear Mr. President,
Dear guests, ladies and gentlemen,
First of all, I'd like to express gratitude to Mr. President for visiting Azerbaijan. We met last time in Baku last November at COP 29, and at that time I invited Mr. President to pay an official visit to Azerbaijan. I'm very grateful that he accepted my invitation, and today is an official visit to our country.
I'm sure that this visit will give additional impetus to our bilateral ties. We have already discussed different aspects of our cooperation and expressed the mutual will to deepen and broaden our partnership. Azerbaijan and Rwanda are good partners and friends. We participate jointly in different international institutions and always support each other. During our chairmanship in the Non-Aligned Movement, Rwanda always supported us. They supported us to be elected chair, and then, when our chairmanship was extended for one more year, they also supported us and joined many of our initiatives to strengthen solidarity within the Non-Aligned Movement. Definitely, we always actively cooperate in the United Nations and extend mutual support to each other.
I'm glad that in recent years our relations have become more result-oriented. There have been different delegations from Azerbaijan visiting Rwanda. Last year, the delegation of the Heydar Aliyev Foundation visited Rwanda, and I'm grateful to Mr. President for receiving the Vice President of the Heydar Aliyev Foundation, Leyla Aliyeva. She was very impressed with what she had seen—the large-scale development of the country and also the commitment of the people to statehood, independence, and their independent policy. We are also glad that the Heydar Aliyev Foundation has a chance to support educational programs in your country. By the way, this area, I think, should be one of the priorities in our bilateral relationship. I looked at some information prior to Mr. President's visit and found out that we have only one student from Rwanda studying in Azerbaijan. I think we can jointly work to increase the number of students. It's within the framework of the state scholarship of Azerbaijan. There was a delegation from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs this year and also a delegation from the ASAN Agency, the public services agency, to Rwanda with respect to established cooperation and maybe to set up something similar to ASAN. I have already discussed it with Mr. President.
He will be visiting one of the public services centers in Azerbaijan and will be very glad if we can provide technical and financial assistance in order to establish this kind of agency in Rwanda. We discussed today opportunities in the energy sector. Both our countries are actively working on that, and also in the area of mining, where there is potential to strengthen our cooperation. We just need to have maybe more regular contacts on different levels and exchanges of business delegations, delegations of different ministries, in order to explore the opportunities of doing business together and also investment opportunities. I expressed our readiness to engage in investment projects in Rwanda, and I'm sure that the visit of Mr. President, our discussions, and the discussion which will follow the press conference will create a very solid platform for partnership in the economic and trade area. We have an excellent political relationship, so we need to have the same level of relationship in all other areas.
Once again, Mr. President, thank you for visiting us. I wish you a pleasant stay.