Azernews.Az

OSCE mediators brokering settlement to the Armenia-Azerbaijan conflict over Nagorno Karabakh and the OSCE chairman’s personal envoy have arrived in Baku to hold talks with senior officials.

Robert Bradtke, the US co-chair of the Minsk Group, told reporters upon arrival that their visit aims to facilitate enforcement of the statement issued in Sochi during the trilateral presidential meeting mediated by Russian President Dmitry Medvedev in January. The mediators declined to answer further questions.

In the statement, issued at the tenth trilateral meeting in Sochi, Azerbaijani and Armenian Presidents Ilham Aliyev and Serzh Sargsyan voiced their readiness to accelerate reaching agreement on basic principles of the Nagorno Karabakh conflict settlement.

The Minsk Group co-chairs - Robert Bradtke and his counterparts, Igor Popov of Russia and Jacques Faure of France - started their visit to the region last Friday. Prior to arriving in Azerbaijan, they held talks with the Armenian president and foreign minister in Yerevan and also visited Nagorno Karabakh, an Azerbaijani region where ethnic Armenians are running a self-proclaimed republic.

President Ilham Aliyev hosted the co-chairs on Monday. The parties discussed the ongoing peace talks and prospects for resolving the Nagorno Karabakh conflict.

The Minsk Group has been mediating peace talks between Azerbaijan and Armenia since a brutal war between the two South Caucasus republics in the early 1990s. About 20 percent of Azerbaijani territory, including Nagorno Karabakh, has been occupied by Armenian armed forces since a precarious ceasefire was signed in 1994.

Peace talks are underway on the basis of the Basic Principles, a peace outline proposed by the Minsk Group co-chairs. The principles include the return of the territories surrounding Nagorno Karabakh to Azerbaijani control; determining the final legal status of Nagorno Karabakh; a corridor linking Armenia to the region; and the right of all internally displaced persons to return home.

This story is published by AzerNEWS Weekly under a project funded by the Foundation for State Assistance to the Development of the Media under the President of the Azerbaijan Republic.