Agence France Presse
April 24, 2004 Saturday 7:10 AM Eastern Time
Armenian leader to visit France on Sunday
YEREVAN
Armenian President Robert Kocharian heads to France on Sunday for a
visit during which he will meet with his French counterpart Jacques
Chirac, his press service said.
“The presidents of Armenia and France will discuss bilateral and
regional cooperation during their meeting,” presidential spokesman
Asmik Petrosyan told AFP.
France, along with Russia and the United States, is a co-chair of the
Minsk Group, a 13-nation grouping within the Organization for
Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) that has been seeking to
mediate between Armenia and Azerbaijan in their dispute over the
Nagorno-Karabakh enclave.
Armenia and neighboring Azerbaijan went to war in the early 1990s
when Nagorno-Karabakh, mainly populated by Armenians, seceded from
Azerbaijan at the time of the Soviet Union’s collapse, and the two
Soviet Caucasian republics became independent.
More than 30,000 people were killed and a million were left homeless
before a ceasefire was agreed in 1994, with Armenia in de facto
control over the mountainous territory inside Azerbaijan.
The two former Soviet republics in the Caucasus remain in an
undeclared state of war over the enclave.
Kocharian is due to leave Paris on Tuesday and head to Warsaw.