ARMENIA RESPONDS TO ‘UPDATED’ KARABAKH PEACE PLAN
Asbarez
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Mar 4th, 2010
YEREVAN (RFE/RL)-Armenia has officially responded to international
mediators’ recently modified plan to end the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict,
an aide to President Serzh Sarkisian said on Thursday.
The American, French and Russian co-chairs of the OSCE Minsk Group
announced in January that they have developed an "updated version"
of the basic principles of a Karabakh settlement. They have still not
disclosed changes made in a document that was formally submitted the
conflicting parties in Madrid late 2007.
The Armenian and Azerbaijani presidents are understood to have
discussed the updated Madrid document at their January 25 talks in
Russia hosted by President Dmitry Medvedev. Russian Foreign Minister
Sergei Lavrov Serzh Sarkisian and Ilham Aliyev agreed to "prepare their
own concrete ideas and formulations" on their remaining disagreements.
According to Garnik Isagulian, Sarkisian’s representative to the
Armenian parliament and former national security adviser, the Armenian
side has already sent relevant proposals to the mediators. But he
said he is unaware of their content.
"Armenia has submitted its concrete proposals, whereas the president
of Azerbaijan, according to our information, has still not made any
proposals," Isagulian told a news conference.
Azerbaijani Foreign Minister Elmar Mammadyarov said on Wednesday that
Baku has already accepted the Minsk Group’s modified peace proposals
"with some exceptions." "We want to find out the Armenian side’s
opinion about the amended document, and for that purpose I will meet
the Minsk Group co-chairs [in Paris] on March 5," he said, according
to Azerbaijani media.
In a recent interview with the Euronews TV channel, Aliyev again
claimed that the mediators’ peace proposals are "based on restoration
of the territorial integrity of Azerbaijan." "Azerbaijan will never
agree to independence of Nagorno-Karabakh, or to any kind of mechanisms
or procedures which will eventually lead to secession," he said.
Armenian leaders insist that the proposed agreement does include such
a mechanism. They say one of the basic principles upholds the Karabakh
Armenians’ right to formalize the disputed region’s secession from
Azerbaijan in a future referendum.