The foreign ministers of Armenia and Azerbaijan will meet in Brussels on Wednesday to discuss ways of reviving the Nagorno-Karabakh peace process, it was announced on Monday.
It will be the first face-to-face meeting of Azerbaijani Foreign Elmar Mammadyarov and his recently appointed Armenian counterpart, Zohrab Mnatsakanian.
The Armenian Foreign Ministry said on its Twitter page that the talks will be held at the initiative of the U.S., Russian and French mediators co-heading the OSCE Minsk Group.
The mediators indicated their intention to organize such talks when they visited Yerevan in mid-June. It was their first trip to Armenia since the recent change of the country’s government resulting from mass protests. In a statement, they said Prime Minister Nikol Pashinian and other Armenian leaders expressed their “willingness to continue working productively under the auspices of the Co-Chairs.”
Pashinian has repeatedly called for Karabakh representatives’ direct involvement in Armenian-Azerbaijani peace talks. He has said that he has no mandate to “negotiate on behalf of the Karabakh people.”
Mammadyarov and other Azerbaijani officials have criticized those statements, saying that Baku will not directly negotiate with the “separatist regime” in Karabakh. “The upcoming meeting will show whether Armenia is at last ready to play a constructive role in the conflict’s resolution,” Mammadyarov said on Monday.
Pashinian has yet to publicly clarify his view on a framework peace accord that has been advanced by United States, Russia and France for more than a decade. It calls for a phased settlement that would start with the liberation of virtually all seven districts around Karabakh which were fully or partly occupied by Karabakh Armenian forces during the 1991-1994 war. In return, Karabakh’s predominantly ethnic Armenian population would eventually determine the territory’s internationally recognized status in a referendum.
Former President Serzh Sarkisian’s government said all along that this compromise peace formula is largely acceptable to Yerevan.
Sarkisian and Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev pledged to revive the stalled peace process at their last face-to-face meeting held in Geneva in October 2017. Their foreign ministers held what they described as “positive” follow-up talks in December and January. The mediators said in February that the two sides have pledged to “continue intensive negotiations” after forthcoming electoral processes in Azerbaijan and Armenia.
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