THE MEETING OF THE PRESIDENTS OF ARMENIA AND AZERBAIJAN, FOURTH FOR THIS YEAR, WILL TAKE PLACE IN YALTA

18.08.2000, MEDIAMAX, YEREVAN. The regular meeting of the presidents of Armenia and Azerbaijan will take place in Yalta within the framework of the unofficial summit of the leaders of CIS states, which starts today.
This will be the fourth meeting of Robert Kocharian and Heydar Aliyev in 2000. The first meeting took place in January within the CIS summit in Moscow. Then Robert Kocharian and Heydar Aliyev met in February 2000 within the framework of the World Economic Forum in Davos. On June 20 the leaders of Armenia and Azerbaijan met in Moscow.
The beginning of direct bilateral negotiations of Kocharian and Aliyev was marked in spring 1999 – two meetings of the presidents of Armenia and Azerbaijan took place then, in Washington, D.C. and Moscow. The leaders of the two countries have met twice in Geneva – on July 16 and August 23, 1999, and in Yalta on September 11 , 1999 as well. The next meeting of the presidents of Armenia and Azerbaijan was held on October 11, 1999 on Armenian-Azeri border in Sadarak district of Nakhichevan Autonomous Republic. After the terrorist act in the parliament of Armenia on October 27 1999 the meetings of Kocharian and Aliyev were stopped for a while. They met in Istanbul in November 1999 within the framework of OSCE summit, but that meeting did not bear a character of full value negotiations.
In February 2000, in the interview to the National TV of Armenia Robert Kocharian said that during the negotiations with Heydar Aliyev “we agreed to be ready to discuss all the possible, even particularly theoretical variants of the settlement”.
The co-chairmen of the OSCE Minsk group and the leaders of the co-chairmen states of Minsk group have repeatedly declared that they support the direct dialogue of Kocharian-Aliyev.
The OSCE Chairperson-in-Office, the Austrian foreign minister Benita Ferrero-Waldner declared in May 2000 in the exclusive interview to MEDIAMAX that the dialogue between the two Presidents is crucial. “The good working relationship between the two leaders has opened a new era of the peace process”, she said. -0-