President Gül to visit Azerbaijan at delicate time

In addition to Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev, the summit's host, and Gül, the presidents of Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan are all expected to take part in the meeting. The summit will take place Oct. 2-3.

The first such summit was held in 1992 at the initiative of then-Turkish President Turgut Özal. The most recent edition of the summit took place in November 2006 in Antalya.

The summit in Nakhchivan will offer President Gül a unique opportunity to have lengthy bilateral talks with Aliyev following Monday's announcement by Armenia and Turkey that they would begin six weeks of domestic consultations before signing accords on establishing diplomatic relations under a roadmap announced in April.

The normalization of ties with Armenia, strongly backed by the United States as a step to improve security in the region, risks angering Azerbaijan, an energy supplier to the West and a key source of gas supplies for the planned Nabucco pipeline. “The opening of the Turkish-Armenian border before the resolution of the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict contradicts the national interests of Azerbaijan,” Azerbaijani Foreign Ministry spokesman Elkhan Polukhov said on Tuesday. Meanwhile, sources say a summit of parliament speakers will also be held before the presidential summit of the Turkic-speaking countries. They, however, did not provide specifics on the date.

Sarksyan: No Nagorno-  Karabakh precondition

Following the agreement, brokered between Ankara and Yerevan under Swiss mediation, anticipation has been growing ahead of a planned visit by Armenian President Serzh Sarksyan to Turkey on Oct. 14, when he is due to attend the return leg of a World Cup qualifying soccer match between the two countries. A few days before Monday's announcement, Sarksyan said he would not travel to the game, the first leg of which Turkish President Gül watched last year in Yerevan, unless the border is reopened or there are clear signs that it is about to open.

Turkey closed the frontier in 1993 in solidarity with ally Azerbaijan, which was fighting Armenian-backed separatists in the breakaway mountain region of Nagorno-Karabakh. Both Azerbaijan and Armenia are former Soviet republics.

Negotiations with Turkey and the reached agreement do not contain any kind of preconditions concerning the peaceful regulation of the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict or any problem in relation to this,” Sarksyan said on Tuesday in a speech to the Armenian diplomatic corps, according to the president's office.

The Nagorno-Karabakh conflict -- a rivalry arising from the Soviet Union's collapse -- remains unresolved, with Azerbaijani and ethnic Armenian forces still facing off over a tense front line 15 years after agreeing to a cease-fire.

In an apparent bid to tame expectations of an impending resolution of the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict, Sarksyan also said it will take years despite serious progress made in Armenian-Azerbaijani negotiations.

“It is important that you too explain to everyone -- and officials in the countries where you are accredited in the first instance -- that the conflict's resolution is not a matter of days, weeks or months. Everyone must clearly understand that we are currently negotiating on only several of the basic principles of the settlement,” Sarksyan was quoted as saying by the Armenia media, while speaking to Armenia's ambassadors around the world.

“Even if we reach an agreement on them, many other principles and the accord itself, which should regulate details of the [peace] implementation, will remain unresolved. That is a process that requires a great deal of work.”

Sarksyan also argued on Tuesday that while some of the basic principles are “far from an ideal solution imagined by ourselves,” the proposed settlement upholds the Nagorno-Karabakh Armenians' right to self-determination and “multi-layered security guarantees.”