The troika spearheading international efforts on finding a negotiated peace to the protracted dispute between Armenia and Azerbaijan over Nagorno-Karabakh have again called on the sides to make progress in their talks to be able to get down to drafting a peace agreement.


Igor Popov of Russia, Bernard Fassier of France, and Robert Bradtke of the United States, who jointly head the Minsk Group of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE), released a statement (http://www.osce.org/item/45202.html) from Vienna, Austria, on Monday following their tour of the two South Caucasus republics as well as the disputed region of Nagorno-Karabakh late last week. Their visits overlapped with the regional tour of U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton who visited both Yerevan and Baku where she also discussed prospects of peace in Karabakh and the wider region.

The OSCE Minsk Group cochairmen’s visits also came shortly after a joint statement issued by the leaders of Russia, the United States and France from the G8 summit in Canada on June 26, calling on Armenia and Azerbaijan to accelerate work and move closer to a peace deal.

In the July 5 statement, the Minsk Group cochairmen said they “urged the parties, in a spirit of constructive compromise, to take the next step and move towards completing work on the Basic Principles to enable the drafting of a peace agreement to begin.” They also said they “called upon the sides to strictly observe the 1994 ceasefire and exercise restraint along the Line of Contact.”

Presenting details of their discussions in Yerevan, Baku and Stepanakert, the cochairmen said, vaguely, that during their visit, they “also presented to the parties their plan to undertake a mission to the occupied territories in this fall, which was accepted in principle.”

The “message of peace” contained in the recent statement by the U.S., Russian and French leaders was also underscored by Secretary Clinton while she met with President Serzh Sargsyan of Armenia in Yerevan and President Ilham Aliyev of Azerbaijan in Baku as part of her five-country diplomatic tour.

“We stand ready to help both Armenia and Azerbaijan achieve and implement a peace settlement. We know this will not be easy. But we think it is the necessary foundation for a secure and prosperous future,” Clinton said at a news conference in Yerevan on Sunday.

Basic principles of settlement refer to the provisions contained in a so-called Madrid document proposed to Armenia and Azerbaijan in 2007 as a basis for hammering out a framework agreement on Nagorno-Karabakh. The plan basically calls for an Armenian withdrawal from several districts now controlled by the Karabakh military, the return of Azerbaijani refugees, security guarantees for the Armenian population and an interim status for Karabakh with the possibility of a future determination of the region’s ultimate legal status.

The conflict between Armenians and Azerbaijanis over Nagorno-Karabakh, a predominantly ethnic Armenian region, erupted in 1988 and escalated into a full-blown war in the early 1990s when the region declared its independence from Baku amid the disintegration of the Soviet Union.

More than 30,000 people are estimated to have died on both sides in the 1991-94 war that ended with a Russia-brokered ceasefire. Armenians remain in control of Nagorno-Karabakh, but tensions along the line of contact with Azerbaijan have persisted. Four Armenian and one Azeri troops were killed in one of the deadliest ceasefire violations in years that occurred in the conflict zone as recently as last month, putting at risk the peace process and all but pushing the two rival countries to the brink of renewed hostilities.

After their latest shuttle diplomacy the Minsk Group co-chairs said they expect that the next meeting on Karabakh between the heads of their delegations and the foreign ministers of Armenia and Azerbaijan will take place as early as on July 16-17, on the margins of the OSCE Informal Ministerial in Almaty, Kazakhstan.