Azerbaijan suspends cooperation with USAID, foreign minister says

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Azerbaijan suspends cooperation with USAID, foreign minister says

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BAKU (Reuters) – Azerbaijan has refused to renew its cooperation agreement with The United States Agency for International Development (USAID), Foreign Minister Jeyhun Bayramov said on Thursday, accusing Washington of using USAID to pursue its political agenda.

Bayramov, who was speaking at a news conference with his Georgian counterpart, said that Baku had suspended cooperation with USAID in June 2024.

USAID was not immediately available for comment.

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Azerbaijan began criticising USAID in late 2023 after Samantha Power, the agency’s head, said that Azerbaijan’s military operation to return its breakaway region of Nagorno-Karabakh had “forced more than a hundred thousand people to leave their homes and move into neighbouring Armenia.”

In response to Power’s statement, Hikmet Hajiyev, a foreign policy adviser to President Ilham Aliyev, said that USAID “has no place in Azerbaijan anymore.”

USAID describes itself as the U.S. government agency which leads international development and humanitarian assistance efforts to partner countries. On its website it says its mission is also to “promote and demonstrate democratic values abroad, and advance a free, peaceful, and prosperous world” in support of American foreign policy.

Azerbaijan is not the first country in the post-Soviet space to stop cooperation with USAID.

In 2012, the agency’s activities were halted in Russia, and in 2023, Abkhazia, a Russia-backed breakaway region of Georgia withdrew from USAID projects.

(Reporting by Nailia Bagirova; Editing by Andrew Osborn)

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