The National, UAE
Nov 23 2009

Armenia and Azerbaijan hold talks

Carl Schreck, Foreign Correspondent

Last Updated: November 23. 2009 12:37AM UAE / November 22. 2009 8:37PM
GMT MOSCOW // The presidents of Armenia and Azerbaijan met yesterday
for talks over the disputed Nagorno-Karabakh territory, one day after
the Azerbaijani president, Ilham Aliyev, threatened military action
against the Armenian-controlled region should negotiations fall
through.

Mr Aliyev and his Armenian counterpart, Serzh Sarksyan, met at the
French consul general’s residence in Munich, Germany, to discuss the
mountainous territory, which has been the focus of a frozen 15-year
conflict between the two ex-Soviet republics. They agreed to a
ceasefire in 1994 after a six-year war that left 30,000 people dead.

Before the meeting, Mr Aliyev said a failure to reach any resolution
on Karabakh’s status could force his country to respond militarily.
`If that meeting ends without result, then our hopes in negotiations
will be exhausted and then we are left with no other option. We have
the right to liberate our land by military means.’

Analysts were not expecting the meeting to produce major results. A
statement by the Azerbaijan state news agency AzerTac yesterday said
only that the two leaders had met and discussed `the current state and
prospects of the talks to solve’ the Karabakh conflict.

The negotiations come at a time of significant changes in the region.
Turkey and Armenia have agreed to resume diplomatic relations and open
their borders, which have been closed since 1993, when Ankara sided
with Azerbaijan, whose Azeri majority is ethnically Turkic, on
Karabakh.

The normalisation of ties between Armenia and Turkey has increased the
stakes for the Azerbaijani capital, Baku, to resolve the Karabakh
issue, as Azerbaijan understands it is losing leverage in the conflict
as relations warm between Ankara and Yerevan, the Armenian capital,
said Svante Cornell, the research director of the Central
Asia-Caucasus Institute and Silk Road Studies Program at Johns Hopkins
University in the United States.

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