20 June 2008, 12:23
Fried: unblocking of Turkish-Armenian border should not be associated with Nagorno-Karabakh
Daniel Fried, assistant of the US Secretary of State for Europe and Eurasia, told on June 18 at the hearing held in the Committee for Foreign Matters of the US Congress that unblocking of the Turkish-Armenian border should not be interlinked with settlement of the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict.
The hearing under the motto "Caucasus: frozen conflicts and locked borders" passed under obvious domination of the Armenia's topics. Howard Berman, chairman of the Committee, dedicated more than a half of his introductory speech to Armenian-Azerbaijani relations and focused mainly on the need to unblock the Armenian-Turkish from the part of Turkey. He was supported by other Committee members who dealt with the necessity to recognize the 1915 Armenians' genocide, support Armenia, a threat of war from Azerbaijan, etc.
However, Mr Fried has noted that Turkey is a very important US foreign policy ally. Despite persistent pressing by Committee members he has evaded from treating the massacres of Armenians in 1915 in Ottoman Turkey as genocide, having noted that this would not contribute to reconciliation. According to his story, despite the huge Azerbaijan's military expenses and bellicose rhetoric of Azerbaijani officials, the USA are not going to highly assess the probability of restarting combat actions in Nagorno-Karabakh, although they monitor the situation with high attention.
Author: Lilit Ovanisyan, CK correspondent
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