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US, Russia, France call for agreement on Nagorno-Karabakh
"We urge the presidents of Armenia and Azerbaijan to resolve the few differences remaining between them and finalize their agreement," US President Barack Obama, France's Nicolas Sarkozy and Russia's Dmitry Medvedev said in a joint statement, released during the Group of Eight summit in Italy.
The US, Russia and France co-chair the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe's (OSCE) Minsk Group.
The presidents of Armenia and Azerbaijan are expected to meet in Russia on July 17 in talks that diplomats say could yield a breakthrough in the 15-year-old conflict over the province of 150,000 people.
Ethnic Armenian separatists, backed by Armenia, fought a war to throw off Azerbaijan's control over Nagorno-Karabakh in the early 1990s at the time of the collapse of the Soviet Union. Separatists also seized areas of land around Nagorno-Karabakh. Turkey closed its border with Armenia in 1993 in support of Azerbaijan during its conflict with Armenia. Turkey backs Azerbaijan's claims to Nagorno-Karabakh, which has a large number of ethnic Armenian residents.
Mediators from the OSCE, who have been monitoring peacemaking efforts, had reported in early May that they saw signs of progress.
The statement released by the Minsk Group at the G8 summit on Friday said they were instructing their mediators to present the presidents of Armenia and Azerbaijan with an updated version of a proposed peace outline brought forward in the Madrid Document of November 2007.
Presidents Serzh Sarksyan of Armenia and Ilham Aliyev of Azerbaijan met in early May at the residence of the US ambassador in Prague as Washington and other governments pushed for a solution to the conflict over Nagorno-Karabakh.
The presidents “were able in principle to reduce their differences on the basic principles and ... agree on the basic ideas that they came here to discuss,” Matthew Bryza, the US deputy assistant secretary of state for European and Eurasian affairs and co-chairman of the OSCE's Minsk Group, said at the time.
Among the principles called for in the Madrid Document, and which the United States, Russia and France reaffirmed on Friday, were “the return of the territories surrounding Nagorno-Karabakh to Azerbaijani control and an interim status for Nagorno-Karabakh providing guarantees for security and self-government.”
It also embraced “a corridor linking Armenia to Nagorno-Karabakh” as well as a future determination of the final legal status of Nagorno-Karabakh “through a legally binding expression of will” and the right of “internally displaced persons and refugees to return to their former places of residence.”
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