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NATO chief urges solution to Karabakh conflict

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January 18, 2001 

BAKU-- (AP) - NATO Secretary-General George Robertson said Wednesday that Azerbaijan and Armenia needed to resolve their dispute over the Nagorno-Karabakh region to open the way for economic progress, and said that the western alliance hadn't barred any potential members.

Robertson noted that none of the countries in the Caucasus region had applied for NATO membership.

"However, the alliance is open for everyone," he said.

Armenia, Azerbaijan and Georgia have all called for closer ties with NATO following the collapse of the Soviet Union. But Russia is wary of increasing western influence in the region, and has moved to increase its own clout there.

Robertson's visit was intended to help expand relations between NATO and Azerbaijan, an active participant in the alliance's Partnership for Peace program. Azerbaijani Defense Minister Safar Abiyev said that his nation valued "NATO's role in guaranteeing security in the world."

"Azerbaijan regards participation in European security institutions and the development of partnership with NATO as a key condition for its territorial integrity and security," Abiyev said, according to the Interfax news agency.

But the top issue on the agenda was the more than decade-old dispute over Nagorno-Karabakh, the ethnic Armenian-majority enclave that declared independence from Azerbaijan in 1988. The secession ignited a war that killed an estimated 15,000 people and drove about 1 million from their homes.

"Resolving the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict, with the help of international organizations, would create broad conditions for solving economic and political problems in the region," Robertson told reporters Wednesday on the last day of his two-day visit to the Azerbaijani capital Baku.

A truce signed in 1994 ended the war, but sporadic clashes continue, and international mediators have been trying unsuccessfully for years to negotiate a political solution between the two former Soviet republics.

On a two-day visit to Baku last week, Putin said that Russia had offered to step up its mediating effort between Armenia and Azerbaijan. Robertson praised that move, but stressed that it was up to the two neighboring nations to find a solution.