OSCE rearranges monitoring after failure of previous one

By AzerNews

The OSCE mission will hold a monitoring on troops contact line near Ashagi Askipara village of Azerbaijan's Gazakh region on October 19 in accordance with the mandate of special envoy of the OSCE Chairman-in-Office.

Azerbaijan`s Defence Ministry reported that the monitoring will be held on the Azerbaijani side by field assistants of the Personal Representative of the OSCE Chairman-in-Office Jiri Aberle, Yevgeny Sharov and Peter Svedberg.

From the opposite area, the monitoring will be conducted by special representative of OSCE chairman-in-office Andrzej Kasprzyk and field assistants Hristo Hristov and William Pryor.

Earlier, OSCE`s regular monitoring scheduled for October 17 in Ashagi Seyidahmadli village of Fizuli region was stopped due to gun fire from the Armenian side to the positions of the Azerbaijani Armed Forces.

The monitoring was stopped over security reasons.

For over two decades, Azerbaijan and Armenia have been locked in conflict which emerged over Armenia's territorial claims against its South Caucasus neighbor. Since a war in the early 1990s, Armenian armed forces have occupied 20 percent of Azerbaijan's territory, including Nagorno-Karabakh and seven surrounding regions. A fragile ceasefire has been in place since 1994, but long-standing efforts by US, Russian and French mediators have been largely fruitless so far. Armenia has not yet implemented the U.N. Security Council's four resolutions on its pullout from the neighboring country's territories.