The Armenian Foreign Ministry gave the cold shoulder to the Turkish foreign minister’s proposal to hold a meeting with Armenia and Azerbaijan on resolving the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict by saying that Turkey can not be a mediator in the Azeri-Armenian conflict.
Turkish Foreign Minister Ismail Cem on Saturday invited Azerbaijan and Armenia to take part in a trilateral meeting, calling such a hopeful meeting a “serious contribution to finding a solution.”
But Armenian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Dzyunik Agadzhanyan said the proposal “does not have official jurisdiction,” the ITAR-Tass news agency reported from Yerevan, the Armenian capital.
After Cem made the proposal at a conference in Istanbul, an Armenian foreign ministry official at the conference balked at the idea, noting that Armenia and Turkey do not have diplomatic relations.
Turkey’s policy over Azeri-Armenian conflict is that initially Armenian occupation of Azeri territories must be ended and Armenian forces should be withdrawn from Nagorno-Karabakh before it agrees to relations.
Nagorno-Karabakh, a territory located inside Azerbaijan but populated largely by ethnic Armenians, declared independence in early 1988. In the six-year war that followed, separatists backed by Armenia drove out Azerbaijani troops and occupied parts of Azerbaijan proper.
A 1994 truce ended the war, which killed 15,000 people and turned about 1 million Azeris into refugees, but talks on a final settlement have stalled and sporadic clashes still occur on the border.
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