Ankara hopes that recent diplomatic mobility in the South Caucasus will eventually lead to concrete progress in the Nagorno-Karabakh dispute between Armenia and Azerbaijan and will enable Turkey to pass a so-called threshold to move ahead in ongoing efforts for the normalization of ties with estranged neighbor Armenia.
Moscow yesterday hosted Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoðan, who urged President Dmitry Medvedev and his counterpart, Vladimir Putin, on maintenance of the “gained impetus” in efforts of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) to resolve the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict.
The Minsk Group of the OSCE has striven to solve the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict, a territorial dispute between Baku and Yerevan, for 17 years. Russia, along with France and the United States, is one of the three co-chairs of the Minsk Group.
Yerevan was, meanwhile, hosting Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov, whose two-day visit to the Armenian capital began on Wednesday. Ahead of the visit, Russian Foreign Ministry spokesperson Andrei Nesterenko had already said Lavrov would discuss the Nagorno-Karabakh issue during his talks with both President Serzh Sarksyan and Foreign Minister Edward Nalbandian. During a visit to Ankara late last month, Azerbaijan’s Foreign Minister Elmar Mammadyarov voiced his country’s approval of an updated version of the Madrid document on the Nagorno-Karabakh settlement, a senior Turkish diplomat said on Wednesday.
Earlier this week, the OSCE Minsk Group co-chairs presented the updated document to Armenian officials in Yerevan. However, the Armenian side hasn’t yet made any statement concerning their views on the document.
In late January Medvedev is expected to host Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev and Armenian President Serzh Sarksyan at a trilateral summit in Russia, the senior Turkish diplomat, speaking on condition of anonymity, told Today’s Zaman.
“Any joint declaration, either verbally or in written form, to be released after the meeting in Russia and which clearly shows that the Armenian and Azerbaijani sides have full consent over the updated version of the Madrid Principles will mark a milestone. It will give a freer hand to Turkey for maintaining faster progress through ongoing efforts for normalization in the South Caucasus,” the senior diplomat underlined.
Ankara, which last year agreed with Yerevan to establish diplomatic relations and reopen their border, overcoming a century of hostility stemming from the killing of Anatolian Armenians during World War I, insists on seeing improvement towards a resolution of the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict in parallel with its efforts to normalize relations with Yerevan.
Ankara argues that partial normalization in the Caucasus cannot be sustainable as long as parties don’t exert efforts for complete normalization.
The Madrid document contains the proposals put forward by the OSCE Minsk Group co-chairs on the basic principles of a settlement. The document was presented to the Armenian and Azerbaijani representatives at the OSCE summit in Madrid in November 2007.
On the sidelines of a G-8 summit held in L’Aquila, Italy, in July last year, the Minsk Group said Azerbaijan and Armenia must come to an agreement on the disputed territory of Nagorno-Karabakh on the basis of the Madrid 2007 agreement while also unveiling new principles for settling the dispute, including defining Nargorno-Karabakh’s status in regards to freedom of movement with Armenia as well as road and rail links between the two. The group also said security in the area be guaranteed and troops should be withdrawn.
