State Department denies talks about pressure from Azerbaijan; Armenia hopes for report's new revision

“We didn't do anything under pressure,” an official at the department's Bureau of European and Eurasian Affairs told RFE/RL from Washington. "We were trying to correct some unclear language that led to confusion about our policy. We've determined that our policy has not changed and that we need to stand by the original human rights report."

"I think this whole thing from our side was a mistake in the way that it was handled, and I'm sorry that that mistake has led to all of this exaggerated press attention and has been blown out of proportion," said the official, who asked not to be identified.

The Azerbaijani government was quick to welcome the restored sentence of the report which says, "Armenia continues to occupy the Azerbaijani territory of Nagorno Karabakh and seven surrounding Azerbaijani territories." "This change is a very important news for me," Foreign Minister Elmar Mammadyarov said Thursday, according to the Day.az news service.

Predictably, Armenian reaction to the development was diametrically opposite. "We thought the mistake [in the report's original version] was corrected and are bewildered by such an unserious approach to the matter," Vladimir Karapetian, a spokesman for the Armenian Foreign Ministry, told RFE/RL.

Karapetian said Yerevan hopes that the State Department will again revise the report, arguing that U.S. diplomats had "recognized their mistake" during talks with Foreign Minister Vartan Oskanian and other Armenian officials. RFE/RL