The presidents of Armenia and Azerbaijan reportedly agreed to intensify the protracted search for a peaceful resolution of the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict and bolster the ceasefire regime in the conflict zone when they met in Geneva on Monday.
“The meeting took place in a constructive atmosphere,” read a joint statement issued by the Armenian and Azerbaijani foreign ministers as well as the U.S., Russian and French co-chairs of the Minsk Group after the talks.
“The Presidents [Serzh Sarkisian and Ilham Aliyev] agreed to take measures to intensify the negotiation process and to take additional steps to reduce tensions on the Line of Contact,” it said.
“The Co-Chairs expressed their satisfaction with these direct talks, which took place after a long interval … As a next step, the Co-Chairs will organize working sessions with the Ministers in the near future,” added the statement.
The talks began at the official residence of Switzerland’s permanent representative to the UN office in Geneva in the presence of the U.S., Russian and French mediators. They continued in a tete-a-tete format about an hour later.
Aliyev and Sarkisian then spoke one-on-one for over 45 minutes, according to Vladimir Hakobian, the Armenian presidential press secretary. In a series of tweets, Hakobian also posted a photograph that showed the two presidents seated around a round table placed in the courtyard of the Swiss diplomatic compound.
Switzerland - Presidents Serzh Sarkisian (R) of Armenia and Ilham Aliyev of Azerbaijan begin negotiations in Geneva, 16Oct2017.
“We have no concrete agreements on variants of resolving the problem,” Sarkisian told members of Switzerland’s Armenian community shortly after the summit. “But we agreed to take measures to further ease tensions so that we have no casualties on the frontlines. I must say that both the president of Azerbaijan and I are deeply interested in that.”
“God willing, [Aliyev] will always think so,” Sarkisian said. “He too realizes the complexity of the problem very well and obviously so do I, but the problem is such that there will never be an easy solution to it.”
Sarkisian went on to again rule out any solution that would restore Azerbaijani control over Karabakh. “No Armenian leader will ever take and implement such a decision,” he said.
Aliyev and other Azerbaijani officials did not make public statements immediately after the talks.
Neither Sarkisian nor the joint statement by the two foreign ministers specified the agreed steps aimed at preventing ceasefire violations along “the line of contact” around Karabakh and the Armenian-Azerbaijani border.
The two presidents previously met in May and June last year shortly after four-day deadly hostilities around Karabakh that nearly denigrated into an all-out war. The negotiation process again stalled later in 2016. Aliyev and Sarkisian blamed each other for the deadlock when they addressed the UN General Assembly in New York last month.