Armenia-Azerbaijan dispute surfaces at G-8 summit

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July 10, 2009

Anonymous The Salem News Fri Jul 10, 2009, 02:39 PM EDT

L'AQUILA, Italy (AP) — The United States, France and Russia called Friday for the leaders of Armenia and Azerbaijan to settle a long-running dispute over the Nagorno-Karabakh region.

In a statement released from the Group of Eight summit in Italy, the three countries that co-chair a committee of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe said they "affirm our commitment" to efforts by Armenia and Azerbaijan to finalize "the basic principles for settlement" of the conflict.

Russian President Dmitry Medvedev said that Armenia and Azerbaijan have made progress toward a resolution and that he expects the presidents of the two countries to meet in Moscow soon.

Nagorno-Karabakh is an enclave in Azerbaijan that has been under the control of ethnic Armenian forces since a six-year conflict that killed about 30,000 people and displaced 1 million before a truce was reached in 1994. Turkey closed its border with Armenia in 1993 in support of Azerbaijan during its conflict with Armenia. Turkey backs Azerbaijan's claims to Nagorno-Karabakh, which has a large number of ethnic Armenian residents.

Mediators from the OSCE who have been monitoring peacemaking efforts had reported in early May that they saw signs of progress.

"On the basis of what we heard from both presidents, we expect to be in a position to confirm some progress during the next weeks and months," said Bernard Fassier of France at the time.

The statement the so-called Minsk group put out Friday from the G-8 summit said: "We are instructing our mediators to present to the presidents of Armenia and Azerbaijan an updated version" of a proposed peace outline brought forward in the Madrid Document of November 2007.

"We urge the presidents of Armenia and Azerbaijan to resolve the few differences remaining between them and finalize their agreement on these Basic Principles, which will outline a comprehensive settlement," Friday's statement said.

Presidents Serge Sarkisian of Armenia and Ilham Aliyev of Azerbaijan met in early May at the residence of the U.S. ambassador in Prague as Washington and other governments pushed for a solution to the conflict over Nagorno-Karabakh.

The presidents "were able in principle to reduce their differences on the basic principles and ... agree on the basic ideas that they came here to discuss," Matthew Bryza, U.S. deputy assistant secretary of state for European and Eurasian affairs and co-chairman of the OSCE group, said at the time.

Medvedev told a news conference in L'Aquila on Friday that there are "fewer and fewer" disputed issues and that they "are not something that will take decades to resolve." He said he hopes to host Sarkisian and Aliyev soon. Russian mediator Yuri Merzlyakov has said both leaders have agreed to a meeting July 17 in Moscow.

Among the principles called for in the Madrid Document, and which the United States, Russia and France reaffirmed Friday, were "the return of the territories surrounding Nagorno-Karabakh to Azerbaijani control and an interim status for Nagorno-Karabakh providing guarantees for security and self-government."

It also embraced "a corridor linking Armenia to Nagorno-Karabakh" as well as a future determination of the final legal status of Nagorno-Karabakh "through a legally binding expression of will" and the right of "internally displaced persons and refugees to return to their former places of residence."

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