Czech News Agency
May 7, 2009 Thursday

OSCE’S MINSK GROUP OPTIMISTIC AFTER ARMENIAN-AZERI PRAGUE TALKS

Prague, May 7 (CTK) – The co-chairs of the OSCE Minsk Group – France,
Russia and the United States – have expressed a cautious optimism
after today’s Prague meeting of Armenian President Serzh Sargsyan and
his Azeri counterpart Ilham Aliyev. Relations between Armenia and
Azerbaijan have been very tense for a long time due to the dormant
Nagorno-Karabakh conflict. It was agreed in Prague today that the two
countries’ presidents could meet again in Saint-Petersburg in June.

According to the diplomats from the countries mediating the talks,
this alone is a success. U.S. representative in the OSCE Minsk Group
Matthew Bryza said he was glad that the two presidents had conducted a
constructive dialogue. They were able to bring their differing views
on the fundamental principles of the conflict closer and to basically
agree on the main ideas that they intended to discuss in Prague, he
said. However, Bryza declined to elaborate on what precisely the two
presidents agreed at their meeting in Prague’s residence of the
U.S. ambassador. The negotiators will discuss the details of a
possible agreement with their partners from both countries in dispute
in the next weeks, Bryza said. Neither Aliyev nor Sargsyan turned up
at a press conference regardless of their original plans. Bryza’s
Russian colleague Yuri Merzyakov added that under a tentative
agreement, the Saint-Petersburg meeting would be held at the the
beginning of June. "By then we will meet the two countries’ foreign
ministers and will most probably go to the region to prepare the
meeting," Merzyakov said. French representative in the Minsk Group,
Bernard Fassier, added that representatives of the group countries
still had much work ahead of them. He said that on the basis of what
the group representatives heard from the two presidents today there
were certain expectations that a certain progress could be achieved in
the next months. The OSCE Minsk Group was created in 1992 by the
Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe (CSCE), now the
Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE), to promote
a peaceful resolution to the conflict between Azerbaijan and Armenia
over Nagorno-Karabakh. Since the end of the Nagorno-Karabakh War in
1994, representatives of the governments of Armenia and Azerbaijan
have been holding peace talks on the region’s disputed status mediated
by the OSCE Minsk Group. vv/dr/ms