STEPANAKERT (RFE/RL)–Senior U.S. and Russian envoys visited the Nagorno-Karabakh Republic and met with its authorities on Friday at the start of a fresh regional tour aimed at facilitating a breakthrough in Armenian-Azerbaijani peace talks.
Robert Bradtke and Igor Popov will be joined by the third co-chair of the OSCE Minsk Group, Bernard Fassier of France, to hold similar talks in Yerevan and Baku this weekend, in preparation for a potentially key meeting of the Armenian and Azerbaijani foreign ministers.
The two ministers are due to meet — most probably in the presence of top diplomats from the United States, Russia and France — on the margins of the OSCE’s July 16-17 ministerial conference in Almaty, Kazakhstan.
In a joint statement issued last week, the presidents of the three mediating powers said they are instructing their foreign ministers to “work intensively to assist the two sides to overcome their differences” ahead of the Almaty gathering.
Bradtke cited the statement after talks with Karabakh President Bako Sahakian and Foreign Minister Georgy Petrosyan. “They instructed us and our ministers to work intensively in this period to try to overcome the differences in the peace process,” Bradtke told journalists in Stepanakert. “So we are having meetings here in Karabakh, in Yerevan and in Baku to prepare for this meeting.”
The Karabakh leader, for his part, urged the mediators to issue a proper reaction to the most serious ceasefire violation around on the Karabakh-Azeri border in years that took place on the night from June 18-19. Sahakian said Azerbaijan’s unprovoked attack, which left one Azerbaijani and four Armenian soldiers dead, is “unconstructive” and a “pivotal hindrance” to settling the conflict. “The international community’s failure to properly respond to Azerbaijan, further enforces the position of Baku,” Sahakian said.
Some senior pro-government parliamentarians in Yerevan said this week that Medvedev presented the two parties with new proposals aimed at pushing the peace process further forward. They said Armenian President Serzh Sarkisian reacted to them positively, unlike Azerbaijan’s Ilham Aliyev.
The Armenian government has not confirmed these claims. It has only linked the Saint Petersburg talks with the most serious ceasefire violation around Karabakh in years that took place on the night from June 18-19. It left one Azerbaijani and four Armenian soldiers dead.
According to Popov, the two envoys also spoke with Sahakian about issues that were discussed by the Armenian and Azerbaijani presidents at their last meeting hosted by Russia’s President Dmitry Medvedev in Saint Petersburg on June 18. He did not give any details.
According to Armenian Public Radio, Sahakian told the mediators that the independence and security of the Nagorno-Karabakh Republic “are not subject to any speculations” and stressed that any attempt to take Karabakh’s independence away would be rife with “unpredictable consequences.”
He also reiterated Karabakh’s desire for a peaceful settlement of the conflict within the format of the Minsk Group, and urged the Co-Chairs to return Karabakh to the negotiating table as a full-fledged party to the peace talks.
Popov said he and his American counterpart discussed the firefight with Sahakian General Movses Hakobian, the commander of the Karabakh army. “We reaffirmed our concern about the violation of the ceasefire agreement signed in 1994,” he told journalists. “We believe that these kinds of incidents can damage the peace process and we discussed ways of preventing them in the future.”
The co-chairs’ latest round of regional shuttle diplomacy began ahead of U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s weekend visits to Baku and Yerevan. U.S. officials have said the Karabakh conflict will be high on her agenda.
“We are working both bilaterally … but also as co-chairs together to try to see whether we can make some progress in this period,” Bradtke said.
Artsakh is already liberated and free. Artsakh has already had the referendum done long ago and does not need any other referendums. Armenians will not give up any of the Artsakh liberated lands. Armenians demand from Azerbaijan all Armenian lands occupied by Azeris.
ARMENIA WILL NEVER GIVE THAT LAND TO AZERI THAT LAND BELONGS TO ARMENIANS IF THEY TRY THEY WILL DIE ONE BY ONE
Not only that, we also demand Nakhichevan where the Azerbaijani soldiers demolished on broad daylight our 3,000 midieval Khachkars so that as if deceitfully they’ll cover Armenians’ existence from our anscestral homeland for six thousand years.
We want the peace of the brave and not the peace of the cowards