PRESIDENT OF DISPUTED NAGORNO-KARABAKH TERRITORY SWORN IN

AP Worldstream
Published: Sep 07, 2007

The former security chief of Nagorno-Karabakh was sworn in Friday as
the new president of the Armenian-controlled breakaway region.

Bako Saakian, who took 85 percent of the vote in July, had headed
Nagorno-Karabakh’s security service since 2001 until he resigned to
run for president.

Saakian pledged to push for full independence of the mountainous
territory inside Azerbaijan, which has run its own affairs without
international recognition since driving out Azerbaijani forces in
the early 1990s.

Azerbaijan has rejected the vote as illegitimate and maintained that
Armenian separatists came to power in the former autonomous region
as a result of ethnic cleansing.

"The so-called inauguration is nothing but a buffoonery," said
Azerbaijani Foreign Ministry spokesman Khazar Ibrahim. "Such actions
and their consequences have no legal meaning. Nagorno-Karabakh is an
inalienable part of Azerbaijan."

Armenia’s President Robert Kocharian and other senior Armenian
officials and lawmakers attended the inauguration ceremony in the
regional capital, Stepanakert. Delegations from Georgia’s breakaway
provinces of Abkhazia and South Ossetia also were present at the event.

The July vote was the fourth presidential election in the impoverished
territory that has been controlled by Armenian and ethnic Armenian
forces since a shaky 1994 cease-fire ended one of the bloodiest
conflicts that followed the Soviet collapse.

The six-year war killed 30,000 people and drove more than 1 million
from their homes, including many of the region’s ethnic Azeris. Today,
it remains one of the region’s "frozen" conflicts in the former
Soviet states.

Azerbaijan and Armenia remain locked in a dispute over Nagorno-Karabakh
despite more than a decade of coaxing from international mediators led
by the United States, Russia and France to resolve the region’s status.

Speaking at the inauguration ceremony, Saakian said that Azerbaijan
must accept Nagorno-Karabakh representatives at talks. "We hope that
our opponents will sooner or later come to understanding that there
is no alternative to talks with full-fledged participation of the
Nagorno-Karabakh Republic," Saakian said.

The mostly agricultural region of 146,000 people tied to Armenia by
swaths of Azerbaijani territory also under ethnic Armenian control
has faced a steady brain drain and dire economic problems despite
financial aid from Armenia and the Armenian Diaspora.

Saakian ran as an independent and replaces Arkady Gukasian, who served
two five-year terms.