Baku Today
April 20 2004
Foreign Ministers To Discuss Nagorno-Karabakh In May
Baku Today 20/04/2004 11:36
The new U.S. co-chair of the OSCE’s Minsk Group, Stephen Mann, said
on Monday that finding a peaceful solution to Nagorno-Karabakh
conflict is in the interests of his government.
“What I will be doing in this position is representing the U.S.
national interests and it is in the American national interest to
work for a peaceful, negotiated settlement of the Nagorno-Karabakh
issue,” Mann told reporters while in Yerevan, according to The
Associated Press.
Having discussed the issue of Nagorno-Karabakh with Armenian
diplomats in Yerevan, the U.S. diplomat is due to visit Baku on
Tuesday.
Armenian Foreign Minister Vardan Oskanian said on Monday that he
planned to meet with his Azerbaijani counterpart, Elmar Mammadyarov,
in May.
Oskanian said that the meeting he held last week in Prague with
Azerbaijani Foreign Minister Mamedyarov was useful but did not yield
any result.
Azerbaijan’s former autonomous western region of Nagorno-Karabakh is
home for some 100,000 ethnic-Armenians. The region along with seven
of Azerbaijan’s administrative districts was occupied by Armenian
troops in 1991-94 war.
Major military operations between Armenia and Azerbaijan ended in may
1994 after a cease-fire was signed between the two neighbors. But
despite the cease-fire, shooting still breaks out sporadically across
the line separating Azerbaijan from its occupied territories.
The Minsk Group of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in
Europe has been unsuccessfully mediating between Armenia and
Azerbaijan since 1992 to find a peaceful solution to the conflict.
The Group is led by a troika of diplomats from the United States,
France and Russia.