Azernews.Az

BAKU – OSCE Minsk Group co-chairs brokering settlement to the Nagorno Karabakh conflict submitted a report on their last year’s mission assessing the situation in the Armenia-occupied Azerbaijani territories to President Ilham Aliyev on Tuesday, the French mediator has said.

Bernard Fassier’s statement came after the Minsk Group co-chairs’ meetings with President Aliyev and Foreign Minister Elmar Mammadyarov in Baku on Tuesday. Fassier did not give details of the report.

"Since the document has not yet been submitted to the other side, Armenia, we cannot speak about its details," he told reporters.

A fact-finding mission of the Minsk Group co-chairs visited the occupied territories surrounding Azerbaijan’s Nagorno Karabakh region October 7-13, 2010 on Baku’s initiative. Three technical experts, including two from the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), assisted them in their tasks.

During the talks in Baku, the co-chairs - Bernard Fassier of France, Robert Bradtke of the United States, and Igor Popov of Russia -discussed the issue of investigating skirmishes along the contact line of the Azerbaijani and Armenian troops, in accord with the joint statement signed by Presidents Ilham Aliyev and Serzh Sargsyan in Sochi on March 5, as well as a withdrawal of snipers from the frontline.

Fassier said that as soon as the mediators learned about the killing of a nine-year-old Azerbaijani child by an Armenian sniper on March 8, they issued an official statement in Vilnius, and their scrutiny into the incident has already begun.

"The OSCE chairman’s personal representative Andrzej Kasprzyk and his team are dealing with this," he said, adding that it was too early to sum up the outcomes of the scrutiny.

The co-chairs’ statement, issued in Vilnius, said "such senseless acts, if confirmed, would contravene the commitment of the parties to refrain from the use of force and to seek a peaceful settlement of the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict".

"We have always spoken about the importance of reinforcing the ceasefire," Fassier said. "The co-chairs have insisted for two years on a pull-back of snipers from the Line of Contact. If this request had been met, such an incident would not have occurred."

Following talks in Baku, the OSCE negotiators headed to Yerevan later on Tuesday. The mediators will hold meetings with Armenian leaders on Wednesday. They also plan to visit Nagorno Karabakh, an Azerbaijani region where ethnic Armenians are running a self-proclaimed republic.

Azerbaijan and Armenia fought a brutal war that ended with the signing of a fragile cease-fire in 1994. About 20 percent of Azerbaijani territory has been occupied by Armenian armed forces since then. Peace talks have largely accomplished no result so far. Sporadic clashes on the frontline continue. Frontline skirmishes killed more than 20 soldiers in 2010.

The status of the Nagorno Karabakh region has been a stumbling block in peace talks. Baku says the occupied districts must be freed and Azerbaijani refugees returned home, and only after that could the status of Nagorno Karabakh be determined within Azerbaijan’s territorial integrity, while Armenia insists that self-determination is the core principle for a settlement of the dispute. The mediators are seeking a solution based simultaneously on both principles.