The Turkish daily Hurriyet suggested yesterday that Turkish Foreign Minister Ali Babacan, who last week attended the 45th Munich Security Conference, facilitated an agreement over the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict following bilateral talks with his Armenian counterpart, Edward Nalbandian, and his Azerbaijani counterpart, Elmar Mammadyarov.
Mammadyarov was on board a private jet hired by the Turkish Foreign Ministry for Babacan and his accompanying delegation as the Turkish minister paid a one-day official visit to Baku on Sunday. According to Hurriyet, the two ministers discussed the principle agreement on board the plane, with Babacan informing Azerbaijani President ?lham Aliyev about the agreement during their meeting on Sunday.
In Ankara, Turkish Foreign Ministry officials neither denied nor confirmed the reported agreement, which called for Armenia's gradual return of six settlements in Nagorno-Karabakh, with Azerbaijan opening its highways and railways to Armenia in response. Officials, however, did acknowledge that the Azerbaijani and Turkish ministers flew to Baku together on board a jet hired by the Turkish ministry.
"The negotiations over Artsakh [Armenian name of Nagorno-Karabakh] conflict are not conducted through Turkey," Tigran Balayan, the head of the media relations department of the Armenian Foreign Ministry, was quoted yesterday as saying by an English-language Armenian news portal.
"Foreign Minister Edward Nalbandian has announced many times that the negotiations over the resolution of Nagorno-Karabakh conflict are held in the frames of the OSCE Minsk group co-chairs based on Madrid principles," Balayan also noted, referring to a sub-group of Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) countries called the Minsk Group, which is focused on resolving the Nagorno-Karabakh dispute.
Armenia occupied Nagorno-Karabakh in southwestern Azerbaijan in the early 1990s after a protracted war between Azerbaijan and Armenia over the mountainous region that began in the late 1980s. In a show of solidarity with Azerbaijan, Turkey severed its diplomatic ties and closed its border with Armenia and says Armenian withdrawal from Nagorno-Karabakh is a precondition for normalizing ties. The first step of the principle agreement is, according to H
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