Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev talks tough

"Azerbaijan has the full right to liberate its lands, using all possibilities," Aliyev told reporters.

Armenian-backed forces drove Azerbaijan’s army out of the ethnic Armenian enclave in the early 1990s, in a war that killed 30,000 people and left about 1 million homeless.

A cease-fire was signed in 1994, but no agreement has been reached on the territory’s final status and the uneasy truce is broken by sporadic bursts of gunfire and marred by mutual recriminations.

"We don’t want war. We don’t want our people to be martyred again," Aliyev said, but he noted that Azerbaijanis’ patience was not boundless.

Aliyev was speaking on the 14th anniversary of a Soviet military crackdown that was aimed at squelching nationalist fervor in the former Soviet republic. Tens of thousands of people laid carnations, a symbol of mourning, at the Alley of the Martyrs cemetery and other sites in the capital Baku to commemorate the 134 people killed after Soviet tanks entered the city and the victims of the Nagorno-Karabakh war.

"Today’s independent, strong Azerbaijan is the most valuable thing for the Azerbaijani people, and the people who were martyred along the way made a big contribution to this," Aliyev told reporters.

Aliyev said that current indicators showed that Azerbaijan would have a strong economy within a few years, and that, coupled with strengthening the military, would allow Azerbaijan "to achieve its goals."

"We must not make peace with the situation that has been created," he said.

He criticized the Minsk Group of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, which has been trying to mediate a solution to the Nagorno-Karabakh dispute, saying it should bring more pressure to bear on Armenia.

Aliyev is scheduled to visit France, a co-chairman of the Minsk Group, later this week.