Aliyev says skepticism needs to be responded with action

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02:14

Editor's note: This article is based on an interview with Ilham Aliyev, President of the Republic of Azerbaijan, by CGTN's Tian Wei.

The World Economic Forum starts on Tuesday in Davos, Switzerland, with the theme of "Globalization 4.0: Shaping a Global Architecture in the Age of the Fourth Industrial Revolution." The key messages are the major transformations and re-shifting of global power affecting globalization. Three thousand leaders are expected to attend the forum, and will debate the future of the global economy.

CGTN's senior correspondent Tian Wei is in the Swiss city, and talked to Ilham Aliyev, President of the Republic of Azerbaijan. He shared his thoughts on how developing countries should respond to doubts, as they try to develop their economy.

There is a lot of skepticism in the air whenever a new idea is coming up, particularly from emerging and developing countries. It is important to not only better understand the new idea, debate about it and implement it, but also at the same time to be encouraging and also inspiring in figuring out more ways of making the world better. It's a balance that the developing countries should keep.

"We have skepticism around us when we started to think about how to build a pipeline from Azerbaijan to Mediterranean. There are a lot of speculations, analyses, articles saying that this is not possible, it will never happen, but it happened," said President Aliyev.

Azerbaijan's President Ilham Aliyev reviews a military honour guard as he arrives for a meeting at lunch with French President Emmanuel Macron at the Elysee Presidential Palace in Paris, July 20, 2018. /VCG Photo

According to Aliyev, the doubts are due to the lack of information, and lack of understanding about Azerbaijan's decisiveness to implement the project.

When Azerbaijan started the project, it was in the beginning of 2000. At that time, Azerbaijan was not as strong as it is today, and it largely depended on foreign financial support at that time. "Therefore, we need to respond with what we will do, and we need to respond with result, " said the president.

So, Azerbaijan built a pipeline from Baku to Ceyhan and Mediterranean, and it was built with a length of about 2,000 kilometers. "Everybody saw that. We destroyed this skepticism," said Aliyev. The same was with an even bigger project, Southern Gas Corridor, a project of 40 billion U.S. dollars involving 7 countries.

At that time, a lot of skepticism was about resource base, about how the project is going to be built, about technical difficulty, financial difficulty, etc. But Azerbaijan just kept on doing it, responding to skepticism with action.

"We said we start it, we will do it and now it's almost close to accomplish. Therefore, we need to respond to skepticism not with words, but with action, with what we've done. " said Aliyev proudly, adding that they don't hear voices from those who were skeptical about these projects any longer.

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