Azerbaijan, Armenia Hold Talks On Nagorno-Karabakh

Radio Free Europe, Czech Republic
Sept 16 2004

15 September 2004 — The leaders of Armenia and Azerbaijan held talks
today on the dispute over Nagorno-Karabakh.

Armenia’s President Robert Kocharian and Azerbaijan’s President Ilham
Aliyev held two-way talks before joining Russian President Vladimir
Putin to discuss the ethnic Armenian enclave in Azerbaijan over which
the two neighboring states fought a five-year war in the early 1990s.

The talks were held on the sidelines of a meeting of leaders of
Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS) member countries in the
Kazakh capital Astana.

The OSCE Minsk Group, which is co-chaired by Russia, France, and the
United States, has been mediating between Armenia and Azerbaijan in
the past decade.

Some 35,000 people were killed and about 1 million displaced by the
conflict over Nagorno-Karabakh, which erupted during the breakup of
the Soviet Union.