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EurasiaNet.org, NY
June 14 2012
Azerbaijan to Armenia: Give Our Land Back and Nobody Gets Hurt
June 14, 2012 - 12:18pm, by Giorgi Lomsadze
`If Armenia wants its soldiers to stop dying, it should withdraw from
Azerbaijani territories,' Amidst a recent, deadly pickup in ceasefire
violations, ending the two countries' 24-year conflict over the
breakaway Nagorno-Karabakh territory is as simple as that for
Azerbaijani Foreign Minister Elmar Mammadyarov.
The bloodshed, coinciding with US Secretary of State Hillary Rodham
Clinton's June 4-6 visit to the South Caucasus, has set off a fresh
flurry of expressions of concern from world leaders.
`The cycle of violence must stop,' said Ireland's Foreign Minister
Eamon Gilmore at a joint news conference in Baku with his Azerbaijani
counterpart. Gilmore, chairperson-in-office of the Organization for
Security and Cooperation in Europe, which oversees negotiations
between Armenia and Azerbaijan, called on both sides to remove snipers
from the line of contact and set up a mechanism for investigating the
conflict zone incidents.
Mammadyarov said that frontline snipers will have no targets if
Yerevan pulls back its forces. He also expressed Baku's conditional
support for incident-investigation mechanism. `But this will work
only if Armenian forces withdraw from the occupied territories of
Azerbaijan,' he said. `If the mechanism is put to work now, it would
mean consolidating the status quo, which is unacceptable.'
Armenian Foreign Minister Eduard Nalbandian supported the
incident-investigation mechanism, but Yerevan is likely to resist
Azerbaijani attempts to tie the mechanism to any pullout of forces.
Nalbandian and Mammadyarov will meet in Paris on June 18 for an
OSCE-organized round of talks. US State Secretary Hillary Rodham
Clinton said during her recent Caucasus tour that a new proposal for
resolution of Armenian-Azerbaijani conflict will be tabled in Paris,
but, after years of such promises, her words were met with robust
skepticism in both Yerevan and Baku.
June 14 2012
Azerbaijan to Armenia: Give Our Land Back and Nobody Gets Hurt
June 14, 2012 - 12:18pm, by Giorgi Lomsadze
`If Armenia wants its soldiers to stop dying, it should withdraw from
Azerbaijani territories,' Amidst a recent, deadly pickup in ceasefire
violations, ending the two countries' 24-year conflict over the
breakaway Nagorno-Karabakh territory is as simple as that for
Azerbaijani Foreign Minister Elmar Mammadyarov.
The bloodshed, coinciding with US Secretary of State Hillary Rodham
Clinton's June 4-6 visit to the South Caucasus, has set off a fresh
flurry of expressions of concern from world leaders.
`The cycle of violence must stop,' said Ireland's Foreign Minister
Eamon Gilmore at a joint news conference in Baku with his Azerbaijani
counterpart. Gilmore, chairperson-in-office of the Organization for
Security and Cooperation in Europe, which oversees negotiations
between Armenia and Azerbaijan, called on both sides to remove snipers
from the line of contact and set up a mechanism for investigating the
conflict zone incidents.
Mammadyarov said that frontline snipers will have no targets if
Yerevan pulls back its forces. He also expressed Baku's conditional
support for incident-investigation mechanism. `But this will work
only if Armenian forces withdraw from the occupied territories of
Azerbaijan,' he said. `If the mechanism is put to work now, it would
mean consolidating the status quo, which is unacceptable.'
Armenian Foreign Minister Eduard Nalbandian supported the
incident-investigation mechanism, but Yerevan is likely to resist
Azerbaijani attempts to tie the mechanism to any pullout of forces.
Nalbandian and Mammadyarov will meet in Paris on June 18 for an
OSCE-organized round of talks. US State Secretary Hillary Rodham
Clinton said during her recent Caucasus tour that a new proposal for
resolution of Armenian-Azerbaijani conflict will be tabled in Paris,
but, after years of such promises, her words were met with robust
skepticism in both Yerevan and Baku.