ARMENIA ANNOUNCES NO PROGRESS IN KARABAKH TALKS WITH AZERBAIJAN IN ROMANIA
AP Worldstream
Jun 06, 2006
Armenia’s foreign minister said Tuesday that talks between the Armenian
and Azerbaijani leaders had made no progress toward a settlement of
the dispute over the Nagorno-Karabakh enclave, but that the countries’
top diplomats had instructions to continue negotiations.
Armenian President Robert Kocharian and Azerbaijani President Ilham
Aliev discussed the long-standing conflict on the sidelines of a
Black Sea summit in Bucharest, Romania, on Monday.
Foreign Minister Vardan Oskanian told state television that the talks
had been conducted “in a normal atmosphere, but they did not succeed
in registering progress and giving a positive impulse to solving the
problem of the Karabakh conflict.”
Still, he said that he and Azerbaijani Foreign Minister Elmar
Mammadyarov had orders to try to find points on which they could
bring the two countries’ positions closer.
Nagorno-Karabakh is inside Azerbaijan but populated mostly by ethnic
Armenians, who have run it and seven contiguous districts since an
uneasy 1994 cease-fire ended six years of full-scale war. There are
sporadic border clashes.