MEDIATORS RAISE CONCERNS OVER DEADLY KARABAKH FIGHTING

Agence France Presse
November 17, 2008 Monday 3:47 PM GMT

International mediators raised concerns Monday over fresh fighting
near Azerbaijan’s disputed Nagorny Karabakh region that left at least
one soldier dead at the weekend.

"The situation is tense… We are deeply concerned by what happened,"
US Deputy Assistant Secretary of State Matthew Bryza told a news
conference in Yerevan of the Minsk Group, which leads international
efforts to resolve the dispute.

Backed by Armenia, ethnic Armenian separatists seized control of
Nagorny Karabakh in the early 1990s in a war that killed nearly 30,000
people and forced two million to flee their homes.

An Azerbaijani soldier was killed overnight Sunday during fighting on
the region’s southeastern border, a spokesman for Karabakh’s military
forces, Senor Asratian, told AFP.

He said the fighting began when Azerbaijani special forces launched
an incursion into the region’s territory. The Azerbaijanis were pushed
back and separatist forces suffered no losses, he said.

In Baku, Azerbaijani Defence Ministry Spokesman Eldar Sabiroglu
confirmed that one of the country’s soldiers had been killed and
said two soldiers from Karabakh’s rebel forces had also died in
the fighting.

He denied that Azerbaijani forces had tried to move into the region.

"The armed incident was a result of the violation by the Armenian
side of the ceasefire regime. The Azerbaijani soldiers were acting
only in defence," Sabiroglu said.

The incident comes after Armenian President Serzh Sarkisian and his
Azerbaijani counterpart Ilham Aliyev signed a declaration in Moscow
this month calling for a peaceful resolution to the long-running
dispute.

The country’s two foreign ministers are to meet for further talks in
Helsinki on December 4, the Russian representative in the Minsk Group,
Yury Merzliakov, said at the press conference in Yerevan.

France, Russia and the United States 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).

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.