Agence France Presse
November 19, 2010 Friday 4:42 PM GMT

Armenian president pulls out of NATO summit in protest

YEREVAN, Nov 19 2010

Armenian President Serzh Sarkisian has cancelled plans to attend the
summit of NATO leaders in Lisbon, his office said Friday, in a protest
linked to his country’s conflict with Azerbaijan.

In a statement, Sarkisian’s office said “the president of Armenia has
decided not to go to Lisbon”.

This was because of plans for a declaration at the summit that would
be “a bad signal and create additional difficulties in the negotiating
process to peacefully resolve the conflict” over Azerbaijan’s
breakaway region of Nagorny Karabakh.

Presidential spokesman Armen Arzumanian told AFP the planned
declaration is expected to mention “territorial integrity” as a
principle in resolving conflicts but not others that mediators from
the Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) have
put forward in attempting to resolve the conflict over Karabakh.

“In the project for the Lisbon summit declaration of the three OSCE
principles there is only territorial integrity, and the other two, a
people’s right to self-determination and the non-use of force, are
absent.

“This is unacceptable to Armenia,” he said.

Armenia and Azerbaijan are locked in a long-simmering conflict over
Karabakh, where ethnic Armenian separatists backed by Yerevan seized
control from Baku in a war in the early 1990s that left an estimated
30,000 dead.

Armenia would instead be represented at the summit by Foreign Minister
Eduard Nalbandian and Defence Minister Seiran Ohanian, the statement
said.

From: A. Papazian