AZERBAIJAN, ARMENIA AGREE ON "PREAMBLE" TO NAGORNY KARABAKH DEAL
People’s Daily Online
Source: Xinhua
09:35, January 26, 2010
Armenia and Azerbaijan have reached consensus on the "preamble"
to an agreement on Nagorny Karabakh and will prepare new proposals,
Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said on Monday.
He made the remarks after a meeting among Russian President Dmitry
Medvedev, Armenian President Serzh Sarksyan and Azerbaijani President
Ilham Aliyev on the peace process on Nagorny Karabakh, a breakaway
Azerbaijani region with a large Armenian population.
"There is a general understanding on the preamble of the document,"
Lavrov told reporters after the trilateral talks which were held in
Russia’s Black Sea resort of Sochi.
The preamble revised and updated the OSCE Madrid principles, he added.
The Madrid principles, adopted in 2007, envisage a stage-by-stage
settlement of the Armenian-Azerbaijani conflict.
Though parts of the agreement remain to be synchronized, "the (two)
sides will prepare their concrete proposals, their concrete wording,
which will be worked into the text," Lavrov was quoted as saying by
the RIA Novosti news agency.
Russia, together with France and the United States, is a member of the
OSCE Minsk Group, which is mediating efforts to resolve the Nagorny
Karabakh dispute.
Nagorny Karabakh declared independence from Azerbaijan in the early
1990s and has been a source of conflict ever since.