Turkish Foreign Trade Minister Zafer Çağlayan has said his government expects Azerbaijan to remove visa requirements for Turkish businesspeople to further increase trade between the two brotherly nations.
Speaking at the Turkey-Azerbaijan Business Forum organized by the Foreign Economic Relations Board (DEİK) in Ankara on Friday, Çağlayan said Turkish businesspeople should be able to travel visa-free to Azerbaijan just as their Azerbaijani counterparts can to Turkey. “We are one nation in two states. Our history, culture, brotherhood, holy book and prophet are the same. Looking from that framework, there is nothing that separates us,” the minister said, adding that the trade volume between the two countries, however, is not reflective of those strong bonds. Last year, Turkish-Azerbaijani trade was recorded at $2.5 billion. Çağlayan said it should be easy to bring this number up to $10 billion. For him, a free-trade agreement between the two nations is a must to that end. In his speech, Çağlayan also gave political messages and underlined that Turkey will never approve any rapprochement with Armenia — which currently occupies 20 percent of Azerbaijan’s territories, including Nagorno-Karabakh — before the ongoing issue between Azerbaijan and Armenia is resolved.
Also speaking at the same event, Azerbaijani Minister of Economic Development Shahin Mustafayev drew attention to opportunities for cooperation between the two countries in the field of energy. He also urged businesspeople from both countries to cooperate in third countries.