Interfax, Russia
March 14 2009

Karabakh accuses OSCE of ignoring violations of ceasefire deal by
Azerbaijan

STEPANAKERT March 14

The OSCE’s passive attitude toward increasingly more frequent
violations of a ceasefire deal by Azerbaijan negatively influences the
situation in the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict zone, the Nagorno-Karabakh
Foreign Ministry said in a statement.

The Nagorno-Karabakh Defense Ministry reported earlier that
"Azerbaijan once again violated the ceasefire at the southeastern
section of the contact line between the Nagorno-Karabakh and Azeri
armed forces in the early hours of March 13, in which a
Nagorno-Karabakh Defense Army serviceman on duty was killed by sniper
fire."

Commenting on the incident to Interfax on Saturday, the Nagorno-
Karabakh Foreign Ministry called it symptomatic that the incident had
occurred the next day after the office of OSCE chairman-in-office’s
personal representative Andrzej Kasprzyk monitored the contact line at
this same area.

"This incident, which led to a loss of life, happened because of the
absence of a public response by the office of OSCE chairman-in-
office’s personal representative Andrzej Kasprzyk to increasingly more
frequent ceasefire agreement violations on the part of Azerbaijan,
which now occur even during monitoring conducted by the office of the
personal representative of the OSCE chairman-in-office," the
Nagorno-Karabakh Foreign Ministry said.

"The absence of a political qualification of such actions, which
Stepanakert has repeatedly pointed to, only encourages the aggressor,"
it said.

"Azerbaijan does not even see fit to consider a proposal on
withdrawing snipers from the frontline as a confidence-building
measure, which the foreign ministers of the OSCE Minsk Group made at
an OSCE ministerial session in Helsinki on December 4, 2008," the
ministry said.

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From: Emil Lazarian | Ararat NewsPress