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OSCE Offers Peacekeeping Help In Nagorno-Karabakh

25 January 2006 (RFE/RL) -- The chairman-in-office of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) today said the organization would stand ready to help with the deployment of an international peacekeeping force in the separatist enclave of Nagorno-Karabakh should the presidents of Armenia and Azerbaijan agree on it.

Belgium's Foreign Minister, Karel De Gucht, made the comment after talks with his Azerbaijani counterpart, Elmar Mammadyarov, in Baku.The two discussed preparations for a February 10 summit between Armenia's Robert Kocharian and Azerbaijan's Ilham Aliyev in Rambouillet, near Paris.

"A breakthrough would be a situation in which the troops that are active on both sides would be replaced [with] a peacekeeping force allowing to resolve the remaining problems that in any case will still exist after the Rambouillet talks."

The Kocharian-Aliyev summit will take place under the aegis of the OSCE.

Mammadyarov said he expected no document to be signed at the meeting.

Predominantly ethnic Armenian Karabakh seceded from Soviet Azerbaijan in 1988, triggering a war that claimed an estimated 30,000 lives and drove hundreds of thousands of people out of their homes. Baku demands that Armenian troops withdraw from the seven Azerbaijani administrative districts they have been occupying since the early 1990s as a prerequisite for peace.

(RFE/RL, Azerbaijani Service, Turan, APA)

Copyright (c) 2006. RFE/RL, Inc. Reprinted with the permission of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, 1201 Connecticut Ave., N.W. Washington DC 20036. www.rferl.org