OSCE SEES NEW HOPE FOR KARABAKH PEACE
By Emil Danielyan and Harry Tamrazian in Prague
Radio Liberty, Czech Rep.
Dec 4 2006
The settlement of the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict may again be on the
cards following the latest meeting of the presidents of Armenia and
Azerbaijan, senior officials from the Organization for Security and
Cooperation in Europe said on Monday.
"Hope is emerging especially as concerning Nagorno-Karabakh,"
the OSCE’s chairman-in-office, Belgian Foreign Minister Karel De
Gucht, was reported to declare in Brussels as he opened a meeting of
foreign ministers of 56 nations making up the Transatlantic security
organization.
The unresolved conflicts in Karabakh and elsewhere in the former
Soviet Union are high on the agenda of the two-day conference. De
Gucht, whose country holds the OSCE’s rotating presidency, urged
fellow ministers to give a new impetus to protracted international
efforts to resolve those disputes.
The Belgian official was present, along with his Russian counterpart
Sergey Lavrov, at the opening of crucial talks between Presidents
Ilham Aliev and Robert Kocharian that took place in the Belarusian
capital Minsk last Tuesday. Both presidents indicated afterwards that
they made further progress towards a mutually acceptable peace accord,
with Aliev saying that the Karabakh negotiating process is nearing its
"final stage."
Goran Lennmarker, chairman of the OSCE Parliamentary Assembly,
was quoted by the Associated Press news agency as saying that the
Aliev-Kocharian encounter has created a "golden opportunity" for
Karabakh peace which must be seized at the Brussels meeting.
Addressing the gathering, Armenian Foreign Minister Vartan Oskanian
agreed that the conflicting parties are now close to cutting a
compromise peace deal. "The last meeting of presidents gives hope
that agreement is possible even on the most problematic issues on
which we don’t see eye to eye," he said.
Azerbaijan’s Foreign Minister Elmar Mammadyarov said late last
week that the parties have reached agreement on all but one of a
dozen basic principles of the conflict’s resolution that have been
suggested by American, French and Russian diplomats co-heading the
OSCE’s so-called Minsk Group.
Oskanian, however, seemed to deny this as he spoke with RFE/RL by
phone later on Monday. "I am not sure that there remains only one
[unresolved] issue," he said.
"Of course, our positions are now close on some difficult issues,"
he added. "But since these negotiations are multi-layered — there
are principles and details — it is really hard to say that we have
agreed on eight principles and need to agree only one more principle.
I find it difficult to say that."
The most important of those principles is a referendum on
Karabakh’s final status that would take place after the liberation of
Armenian-occupied districts in Azerbaijan proper. Oskanian indicated
the parties still disagree on important practical modalities of the
proposed vote, saying that Azerbaijan has yet to fully accept the
Karabakh Armenians’ "right to self-determination."
From: Emil Lazarian | Ararat NewsPress
