En Route To Baku, US Envoy In Yerevan Sees More Progress In Karabakh

EN ROUTE TO BAKU, US ENVOY IN YEREVAN SEES MORE PROGRESS IN KARABAKH TALKS

Asbarez
/2009_1
Wednesday, April 22, 2009

A top U.S. negotiator spoke of a "new phase" in the Nagorno-Karabakh
peace process after he and fellow mediators from France and Russia
held talks with Armenian leaders in Yerevan on Wednesday.

The three co-chairs of the OSCE’s Minsk Group met President Serzh
Sarkisian and Foreign Minister Edward Nalbandian at the start of
a new round of regional shuttle diplomacy aimed at speeding up an
Armenian-Azerbaijani framework agreement on Karabakh. They are due
to proceed to Stepanakert and Baku later this week.

As always, official Armenian sources gave few details of the
confidential talks. A short statement issued by the Armenian Foreign
Ministry late Tuesday said only that they focused on ways of narrowing
the conflicting parties’ differences over the basic principles of a
Karabakh settlement put forward by the mediators.

"Now I feel that we are moving to a new phase with a deeper, more
detailed discussion of the remaining elements of the basic principles
that need to be resolved," the group’s U.S. co-chair, Matthew Bryza,
told RFE/RL after follow-up talks on Wednesday with Nalbandian. "At
the end of the day, what we have to have is a mutual agreement on
a settlement based on the [OSCE’s] three core Helsinki Final Act
principles of territorial integrity, self-determination and non-use
of force."

"I hope that we can sustain this progress here and then in Baku
and Artsakh/Nagorno-Karabakh in the next couple of days," said
Bryza. "There is quite a bit of momentum, and we need to capitalize
on it while we can." He confirmed that Sarkisian and Azerbaijan’s
President Ilham Aliev plan to meet on May 7 on the sidelines of a
European Union summit in Prague.

Visiting Russia on Friday, Aliev expressed hope that the Karabakh
conflict will be settled "rather quickly." "The positions of the
sides recently became closer to a certain degree," he said. "Some
questions that previously seemed hard to solve have been agreed."