MEDVEDEV BROKERS ARMENIA-AZERBAIJAN DISPUTE
International Herald Tribune
Nov 2 2008
France
MOSCOW: President Dmitri Medvedev sought Sunday to underline
Russia’s influence in the Caucasus by bringing together the leaders
of Azerbaijan and Armenia for talks on the breakaway region of
Nagorno-Karabakh.
Nagorno-Karabakh, which has a mostly ethnic Armenian population, broke
away from Azerbaijan in a war in the early 1990s as the Soviet Union
collapsed. It now runs its own affairs, with support from Armenia.
The Armenian president, Serzh Sargsian, and his Azeri counterpart,
Ilham Aliyev, shook hands before Medvedev opened talks at Meiendorf
Castle, the official residence outside Moscow.
After the talks, all three presidents signed a declaration, which
was read out by Medvedev and said that Aliyev and Sargsian had agreed
to continue work on "a political resolution of the conflict." Aliyev
and Sargsian made no comment.
The war between Russia and Georgia in August appears to have lent
new impetus to diplomatic efforts to resolve the Nagorno-Karabakh
situation, with Russia trying to show it can act as a broker for
"frozen conflicts" in the former Soviet Union.
Georgia sent troops and tanks in August to retake the pro-Russian rebel
region of South Ossetia, which threw off Georgian rule in 1991-92.
Russia responded with a powerful counterstrike that drove the Georgian
Army out of South Ossetia and continued into Georgia proper. Moscow
then recognized South Ossetia and another of Georgia’s rebel regions,
Abkhazia, as independent states.
Nagorno-Karabakh is internationally recognized as part of
Azerbaijan. Armenia provides assistance to the breakaway region,
though no government, including Armenia’s, has recognized it as an
independent state.
Fighting between Azerbaijan and Armenia over the area ended in 1994
when a cease-fire was signed. The two sides are still technically at
war because no peace treaty has been signed.
About 35,000 people on both sides were killed in the fighting. More
than a million people were forced to flee their homes, and almost
all are still unable to return.
Along with France and the United States, Russia is one of the co-chairs
of the Minsk Group, which is mandated to act as an intermediary in
the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict. But it is unusual for a head of state
to act directly as mediator.
The presidents, the joint declaration said, "discussed the perspectives
for the resolution of the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict via political
means, through the continuation of direct dialogue between Azerbaijan
and Armenia with the mediation of Russia, the United States and France
as the co-chairmen of the Minsk group."
Armenia is considered Russia’s strongest ally in the Caucasus, but
it is also being courted by the United States and the European Union
in a struggle with Moscow for influence over a transit route for oil
and gas from the Caspian Sea area.