Azerbaijan military threat to Armenia
Azerbaijan and Armenia held a presidential summit on Sunday amid
warnings that a full blown war is brewing over a festering territorial
dispute.
By Andrew Osborn in Moscow
middleeast/azerbaijan/6631572/Azerbaijan-military- threat-to-Armenia.html
Published: 8:28PM GMT 22 Nov 2009
By Andrew Osborn
in Moscow
Azerbaijan and Armenia held a presidential summit yesterday amid
warnings that war was brewing between the countries over a festering
territorial dispute.
Ilham Aliyev, the president of Azerbaijan, said the negotiations in
Munich were a final attempt to avert a military confrontation.
They were convened by the Organisation for Security and Co-operation
in Europe as part of efforts to find a peaceful solution to a problem
that has divided the two former Soviet republics since the 1991 fall
of the USSR.
About 30,000 people died in a war in the early 1990s after ethnic
Armenians living in the Nagorno-Karabakh region inside Muslim
Azerbaijan declared their independence.
Christian Armenia backed the secessionists and supplied them with
money and troops. In 1994, the two sides agreed a ceasefire that left
Armenian forces in control of Nagorno-Karabakh as well as seven
surrounding Azeri regions.
Azeris have never forgiven or forgotten the loss. They have been
talking on and off to Armenia for the past 15 years about clawing back
at least some of the territory.
At the weekend, Mr Aliyev said that his patience was running out. "If
this meeting ends without a result then our hopes in the negotiating
process will be exhausted in which case we will not have any other
choice. We have the full right to liberate our lands by military
means," he added.
It is unclear what concessions Armenia would be willing to make,
especially as it is backed by the Russian military, which is
permanently stationed on its territory.