Armenia to give up occupied Azeri territories: Azeri official

16/05/2005 20:36

BAKU, May 16 (AFP) – Armenia is ready to give up seven regions of
Azerbaijan it occupied during an early 1990s war for the Nagorny
Karabakh enclave, Azerbaijan’s Foreign Minister Elmar Mamedyarov told
ATV on Monday.

“They have agreed to give up all the regions, but they are thinking
when they should do this,” Mamedyarov told the network in Warsaw,
where the presidents of Azerbaijan and Armenian held talks Sunday.

However, an Armenian foreign ministry official in Yerevan told AFP
he had no information about such a agreement.

Referring to Mamedyarov’s statement, foreign ministry spokesman Gamlet
Gasparian said, “we have no such information. I am highly doubtful
that it corresponds to the real situation.”

Armenia and Azerbaijan have been locked in a stalemate over the
majority ethnic-Armenian enclave since they signed a ceasefire to a
six-year war in 1994. Minor, but sometimes deadly violations of the
tense ceasefire are increasingly frequent, taking more than two dozen
lives so far this year, according to some estimates.

An estimated 25,000 people died in large-scale fighting. About
one million people on both sides, most of them Azeris, were
displaced. Armenia won control of Nagorny Karabakh and seven
surrounding regions equal roughly to 14 percent of Azerbaijan’s
territory.

Armenia has said in the past it will not return the seven regions,
which it terms a “security buffer zone” before a settlement over the
status of Nagorny Karabakh itself has been reached.

Azerbaijan and Armenia have on several occasions neared settlement
since the war ended, but talks have always broken down in the
eleventh hour.