ITAR-TASS News Agency
TASS
August 24, 2005 Wednesday
Russia, Armenia, Azerbaijan discussing Karabakh settlement
By Ksenia Kaminskaya and Natalia Simorova
MOSCOW
The foreign ministers of Russia, Armenia and Azerbaijan met in here
on Wednesday to discuss ways of settling the Nagorno Karabakh
conflict.
“The settlement requires active work,” Azerbaijan’s Foreign Minister
Elmar Mamedyarov said, adding that there is an opportunity now “to
arrive at a common denominator regarding this problem.”
His Armenian counterpart Vartan Oskanyan said the self-determination
of Nagorno Karabakh is the priority in settling the conflict, which
should manifest itself in the right of its population to take care of
their fate on their own.
The remaining issues such as the elimination of the consequences of
the conflict, the territorial problem and the return of refugees stem
from this priority and will follow it, he noted.
Meanwhile, the Russian Foreign Ministry expressed Moscow’s position,
which implies “close interaction with the partners in the OSCE Minsk
group /the United States, Russia and France/, the mediator in
settlement the conflict, and energetic assistance to the peoples of
Azerbaijan and Armenia toward the soonest finding of a solution.”
Co-chairman of the Minsk group for Russia Yuri Merzlyakov underlined
that Russia “has a clear position on this issue.”
“We believe that one should not impose his solution of the problem on
the parties to the conflict; they should arrive at it independently,
without outside interference,” Merzlyakov said.
“If a mutually acceptable accord is reached, we’ll be able to
guarantee. it. The settlement should be such as to make all the
parties involved feel safer, the balance of forces that historically
developed in the region should not be upset, while the region itself
should not become an arena of rivalry,” he said.