Armenia denies offer to hand over territory to Azerbaijan

AP Worldstream
May 18, 2005

Armenia on Wednesday denied a claim by neighboring Azerbaijan that
it offered at recent talks to return occupied territory adjacent to
the disputed enclave of Nagorno-Karabakh.

Foreign Ministry spokesman Gamlet Gasparyan said the statement
by Azerbaijan’s Foreign Minister Elmar Mamdyarov that Armenia had
agreed in principle to withdraw from seven occupied regions “does
not correspond to reality.”

The talks between the presidents of both countries took place Monday
ahead of the two-day Council of Europe summit in the Polish capital,
Warsaw.

They focused on the presence of Armenian troops in Nagorno-Karabakh,
a mountainous region inside Azerbaijan that has been under the control
of ethnic Armenians since the early 1990s, following fighting that
killed an estimated 30,000 people.

Despite the denial of the territorial concession, the Armenian
official stressed that the Warsaw talks _ which also included a
meeting between the leaders of Azerbaijan and its main ally Turkey _
had achieved progress in securing a settlement.

“It was another step on the road to a resolution of the
Nagorno-Karabakh problem,” he said.

A cease-fire was signed in 1994, but the enclave’s final political
status has not been determined and shooting breaks out frequently
between the two sides, which face off across a demilitarized buffer
zone.

France, Russia and the United States lead the Minsk Group under the
Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, which is seeking
to assist a diplomatic solution.