BAKU — The foreign ministers of
Armenia and
Azerbaijan have held talks in Geneva on a future peace treaty, officials in
Baku and Yerevan said Monday, following recent deadly clashes between the arch
foes.
اضافة اعلان
Last month, at least 286 people were killed from
both sides before a US-brokered truce ended the worst clashes since the Caucasus
neighbors’ 2020 war.
Baku and Yerevan fought two wars — in 2020 and in
the 1990s — over the contested region of Nagorno-Karabakh, an
Armenian-populated enclave of Azerbaijan.
Armenia’s Foreign Minister
Ararat Mirzoyan and his
Azerbaijani counterpart Jeyhun Bayramov met on Sunday in Geneva to begin
“drafting the text of the peace treaty,” the foreign ministry in Baku said
Monday.
It said the talks followed up the EU-mediated
meeting on August 31 in Brussels between Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev and
Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan.
Azerbaijan called for “full withdrawal of the
Armenian armed units from the territories of Azerbaijan, the opening of
transport and communication lines,” the ministry said in a statement.
Armenia’s foreign ministry said “The parties
exchanged ideas on the peace treaty, ensuring the rights and security
guarantees of the Armenians of Nagorno-Karabakh.”
It reaffirmed its demands of Azerbaijani troops’
“withdrawal from the sovereign territory of Armenia,” release of POWs and “the
introduction of international mechanisms for controlling the situation on the
border.”
The two foreign ministers last met for talks
mediated by US Secretary of State
Antony Blinken on September 20 in New York.
The six-week war in 2020 claimed the lives of more
than 6,500 troops from both sides and ended with a Russian-brokered ceasefire.
Under the deal, Armenia ceded swathes of territory
it had controlled for decades, and Moscow deployed about 2,000 Russian
peacekeepers to oversee the fragile truce.
With Moscow increasingly isolated on the world stage
following its February invasion of Ukraine, the United States and the
European Union have taken a leading role in mediating the Armenia-Azerbaijan normalization
process.
When the Soviet Union
collapsed in 1991, ethnic Armenian separatists in Nagorno-Karabakh broke away
from Azerbaijan. The ensuing conflict claimed around 30,000 lives.
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