KARABAKH TALKS ENTERING ‘IMPORTANT STAGE’: ARMENIA

Canada.com
ews/world/story.html?id=b7cac392-3274-4818-bd58-e1 7f06ce4dbc
Oct 30 2008
Canada

YEREVAN – Negotiations over Azerbaijan’s disputed region of Nagorny
Karabakh have entered a "very important stage," Armenian Foreign
Minister Eduard Nalbandian said Thursday ahead of talks in Moscow.

Russian President Dmitry Medvedev will host the leaders of Azerbaijan
and Armenia on Sunday for negotiations over Nagorny Karabakh, an
enclave of Azerbaijan with a largely ethnic Armenian population that
broke free of Baku’s control in the early 1990s.

"The negotiating process is at a very important stage and can become
more active after Medvedev’s initiative," Nalbandian told journalists
in Yerevan.

He said that after Sunday’s meeting, Armenian President Serzh Sarkisian
will head to France for talks with President Nicolas Sarkozy on the
Karabakh conflict.

Along with the United States, France and Russia are co-chairs of the
Minsk Group, which is seeking to resolve the conflict and is under the
auspices of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe
(OSCE).

Medvedev invited Sarkisian and Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev
to the talks in what analysts say is a bid to strengthen Moscow’s
position in the Caucasus region following the war between Russia and
Georgia in August.

Armenia and Azerbaijan remain in a tense stand-off over Karabakh,
which ethnic Armenian forces seized in the early 1990s in a war that
killed nearly 30,000 people and forced another million on both sides
to flee their homes.

A ceasefire was signed between the two former Soviet republics in
1994 but the dispute remains unresolved after years of negotiations,
and shootings between Armenian and Azerbaijani forces in the region
are common.