Elmar Mamedyarov: "Official Baku is ready to grant autonomy to Nagorno Garabagh within the Azerbaijan Republic"

"We do not see any problem in granting autonomy to Nagorno Garabagh. We have declared repeatedly that if the Armenian community of Nagorno Garabagh wishes to receive the status of Autonomy, such patterns are available in most European countries and Russia, where representatives of different nations reside together", he said, citing Tatarstan and Bashkiria in Russia.

At the same time, he said it does not imply the violation of the territorial integrity of Azerbaijan or rule out the release of the occupied lands of Azerbaijan.

"This is a phased process and the problem lies with the definition of the process of the release, deployment of peacekeeping forces on the occupied lands, restoration of communications and roads, mine clearing, returning displaced persons to their native lands and many other issues", E.Mamedyarov noted.

According to him, official Baku has a normal attitude towards the proposals on the peaceful settlement of theAzerbaijan-Armenia conflict, presented to the conflicting parties by the co-chairs of the OSCE Minsk group and further introduced to the presidents of Azerbaijan and Armenia.

He also noted that these proposals do not serve as a ground for the next meeting of the two presidents.

According to Mamedyarov, Azerbaijan speaks for continuation of the Prague negotiation process and stated that the co-chairs of the Minsk group will pay the next visit to the region to continue talks in mid January of 2008.

/Day.Az/