RUSSIAN CHURCH TO CONTINUE KARABAKH PEACE EFFORTS – PATRIARCH

RIA Novosti
March 18, 2010
Etchmiadzin

The Russian Orthodox Church will continue its efforts to peacefully
settle the Nagorny Karabakh problem, Patriarch Kirill of Moscow and
All Russia said Thursday.

Nagorny Karabakh, an ethnically Armenian region in Azerbaijan, has had
de facto independence since a brutal war between the South Caucasus
neighbors in the early 1990s, and the two remain bitter foes despite
ongoing peace efforts.

"Churches carry their peacekeeping message to where our brothers and
sisters suffer, to where there is danger of bloodshed," Kirill told
journalists in the residence of the head of the Armenian Apostolic
Church in the city of Etchmiadzin.

"The church should not link its peacekeeping message to any political
or pragmatic aims," he said while winding up his three-day visit
to Armenia.

A fragile ceasefire has been in place in the region since the war in
early 1990s, which claimed more than 30,000 lives on both sides.

Karabakh has since remained under Armenian control. Baku has fiercely
opposed any decision on Karabakh that could be interpreted as giving
the region independence from Azerbaijan.

The Russian patriarch urged the soonest possible resolution of
Armenia’s problems with Azerbaijan and Turkey, adding that "keeping
the fire of hatred is a path to nowhere."

Patriarch Kirill on Wednesday paid tribute to the victims of the
Armenian genocide, laying flowers at a memorial in Yerevan.

Turkey has always refused to recognize the killings of an estimated
1.5 million Armenians in the dying days of the Ottoman Empire in
1915 as an act of genocide. A number of countries have recognized
the killings in Armenia as the first genocide of the 20th century.