Agence France Presse, France
July 18 2009

Medvedev hosts Armenia, Azerbaijan peace talks on enclave

MOSCOW, July 18 2009

Russian President Dmity Medvedev hosted talks Saturday between his
Armenian and Azerbaijani counterparts in the latest Moscow-mediated
bid to end their dispute over a separatist enclave.

"The meeting was long and as far as our side was concerned, very
constructive," Interfax news agency quoted Kremlin diplomatic adviser
Sergei Prikhodko as saying.

"We continued the discussion of unresolved questions," he said,
implying that no concrete result had been achieved on the future of
the Azerbaijani enclave of Nagorny Karabakh.

Armenian leader Serzh Sarkisian and his Azerbaijani counterpart Ilham
Aliyev had face-to-face talks with other mediators on Friday and met
again earlier Saturday at an informal summit of heads of former Soviet
states at a Moscow racecourse.

Armenian state-run television quoted Sarkisian as saying earlier that
"no document will be signed" in Moscow

Keen to burnish its credentials as a powerbroker, Russia has been
mediating talks between the two countries over the enclave, now
controlled by ethnic Armenian separatists backed by Yerevan.

At the Group of Eight summit in Italy last week, Russia, France and
the United States, making up the so-called Minsk group of mediators,
pledged to continue supporting the peace talks and called on Aliyev
and Sarkisian to iron out their disagreements.

Prikhodko said Saturday that Medvedev, who has brought the two sides
together four times since November, "confirmed the goodwill of Russia,
as co-chair of the Minsk group, in efforts to find mutually acceptable
solutions in the Karabakh conflict."

Nagorny Karabakh, an enclave of Azerbaijan with a largely ethnic
Armenian population, broke free of Baku’s control in the early 1990s
in a war that killed nearly 30,000 people and forced two million to
flee their homes.

Shootings between Armenian and Azerbaijani forces in the region remain
common despite a 1994 ceasefire.

pho-neo/mb/ag