BAKU — Ilham Aliyev told the president of Laos on Tuesday that trade between their countries “reflects neither our potential nor our intentions.” Neither leader said what that trade is.
Thongloun Sisoulith was making the first official visit to Azerbaijan by a Lao president, the Azerbaijani presidency said, three decades after the two countries established diplomatic relations in 1995. They adopted a joint statement and exchanged an agriculture memorandum and an agreement waiving visas for holders of service passports, which are held by officials rather than ordinary travelers.
A day earlier Cambodia’s prime minister, Hun Manet, was in Baku on an official visit. Aliyev called trade with Cambodia “still very modest,” and the two governments signed three agreements and set up a joint working group on trade and investment. Both leaders are due at the Baku CICA summit that opens on Thursday.
What Baku is offering is mostly access. In his press statement with the Lao president, Aliyev said Azerbaijan would examine specific projects Laos presents to Azerbaijani investors, and proposed reviving a Soviet-era tradition under which more than 2,000 Lao students studied in Azerbaijan, with a scholarship mechanism. With Cambodia he pointed to the ASAN public-service system, a business forum and a possible joint manufacturing facility.
Mines came up with both visitors. Aliyev said the Lao president had told him that people in Laos still lose their lives to landmines decades after its war, and that more than 400 Azerbaijanis have been killed or seriously injured over the past five to six years by mines planted during Armenia’s occupation, a figure that is Aliyev’s own. He proposed sharing experience, technology and training.
Transport is where the gap shows. The Lao president said railway projects to connect Laos with its neighbors could eventually link to the Trans-Caspian Transport Route, while Aliyev said Azerbaijan’s own transport and logistics projects are already finished and that the task now is finding new sources of cargo.
The Laos–Azerbaijan Business Forum is “scheduled to take place in Baku,” Aliyev said, with no date given, and the text of the agriculture memorandum has not been published. In the expanded meeting he told Thongloun he had looked at the trade figures and found them “very small.” Neither presidency’s account says how small.
