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Medvedev hosts Armenia, Azerbaijan peace talks on enclave

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  • Medvedev hosts Armenia, Azerbaijan peace talks on enclave

    Agence France Presse, France
    July 18 2009


    Medvedev hosts Armenia, Azerbaijan peace talks on enclave

    MOSCOW, July 18 2009


    Russian President Dmity Medvedev hosted talks Saturday between his
    Armenian and Azerbaijani counterparts in the latest Moscow-mediated
    bid to end their dispute over a separatist enclave.

    "The meeting was long and as far as our side was concerned, very
    constructive," Interfax news agency quoted Kremlin diplomatic adviser
    Sergei Prikhodko as saying.

    "We continued the discussion of unresolved questions," he said,
    implying that no concrete result had been achieved on the future of
    the Azerbaijani enclave of Nagorny Karabakh.

    Armenian leader Serzh Sarkisian and his Azerbaijani counterpart Ilham
    Aliyev had face-to-face talks with other mediators on Friday and met
    again earlier Saturday at an informal summit of heads of former Soviet
    states at a Moscow racecourse.

    Armenian state-run television quoted Sarkisian as saying earlier that
    "no document will be signed" in Moscow

    Keen to burnish its credentials as a powerbroker, Russia has been
    mediating talks between the two countries over the enclave, now
    controlled by ethnic Armenian separatists backed by Yerevan.

    At the Group of Eight summit in Italy last week, Russia, France and
    the United States, making up the so-called Minsk group of mediators,
    pledged to continue supporting the peace talks and called on Aliyev
    and Sarkisian to iron out their disagreements.

    Prikhodko said Saturday that Medvedev, who has brought the two sides
    together four times since November, "confirmed the goodwill of Russia,
    as co-chair of the Minsk group, in efforts to find mutually acceptable
    solutions in the Karabakh conflict."

    Nagorny Karabakh, an enclave of Azerbaijan with a largely ethnic
    Armenian population, broke free of Baku's control in the early 1990s
    in a war that killed nearly 30,000 people and forced two million to
    flee their homes.

    Shootings between Armenian and Azerbaijani forces in the region remain
    common despite a 1994 ceasefire.

    pho-neo/mb/ag
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