Azeri, Armenian presidents to meet over Nagorno-Karabakh
Armenian and Azerbaijani presidents will meet in the Swiss capital, Bern, in a bid to settle their decades-long conflict over the disputed Nagorno-Karabakh region.
According to the Swiss government, Armenian President Serzh Sargsyan and Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev are set to meet in Bern on Saturday amid growing tensions between the two states over the Nagorno-Karabakh territory.
The Swiss Foreign Ministry said in a statement on Saturday that Switzerland would act as host of the summit, adding that it "will not be taking part in the discussions, which will be between Armenia and Azerbaijan only."
It also said that Swiss Foreign Minister Didier Burkhalter will welcome the two presidents on behalf of the government.
The meeting comes in the wake of a recent warning from Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) mediators that the status quo over the region "has become unsustainable."
The two ex-Soviet Caucasus countries of Armenia and Azerbaijan claim the territory. Ethnic Armenian forces took control of the enclave, which accounts for 16 percent of the Azerbaijan territory, in the early 1990s during a war which lasted from February 1988 to May 1994.
The conflict left an estimated 30,000 people dead and one million displaced before the two sides agreed to a ceasefire in 1994.
A permanent peace accord has, however, proven elusive and the dispute still remains unsettled as clashes continue to erupt regularly along the border shared by the two countries.
Azerbaijan has threatened to take back the region by force if negotiations between the two sides fail to yield results, while Armenia has pledged to retaliate against any military action.
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