Armenia and Azerbaijan Halt Fighting on Border

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/04/06/world/europe/armenia-and-azerbaijan-halt-fighting-on-border.html

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JABRAYIL, Azerbaijan — Armenians and Azerbaijanis agreed on Tuesday to a cease-fire after four days of fighting along the border of a disputed region, putting to rest, at least for now, fears that the outbreak of ethnic strife might spiral into a wider war.

With almost palpable relief, mediators, including the United States, France and Russia, issued statements commending the halt in clashes along the line of contact of the Nagorno-Karabakh region, an ethnic Armenian enclave in Azerbaijan.

By Tuesday evening, the truce seemed to hold, though the Karabakh military reported isolated instances of mortar and tank fire from the Azerbaijani side.

In a statement, Azerbaijan’s Defense Ministry said that “on the basis of mutual agreement, the military actions on the contact line between Armenia and Azerbaijan are halted.”

Russia’s president, Vladimir V. Putin, called President Ilham Aliyev of Azerbaijan and President Serzh Sargsyan of Armenia to urge both to fully adhere to the truce, a Kremlin statement said.

“Expressing serious concern in connection with the wide-scale military clashes that led to multiple victims, Putin called on both sides to immediately support a full halt in combat actions,” the statement said, the Interfax news agency reported.

With the cease-fire in place, this latest bloody flare-up in the quarter-century Nagorno-Karabakh conflict appeared to end as it had begun, with the adversaries at or close to their previous positions but no nearer to a final settlement.

After four days of battle, Azerbaijan’s military said 16 of its soldiers had been killed, while the Karabakh army said it had lost 29 soldiers. In addition, 101 were reported wounded, and 28 were missing in action.

A war between the two former Soviet States over Nagorno-Karabakh, a highland region of mountains, alpine meadows and small villages, halted in 1994 with an earlier cease-fire but no political resolution. That war killed more than 20,000 people and displaced thousands of others. The majority ethnic Armenian population declared an independent state that Azerbaijan rejects.

The weekend fighting seemed pregnant with the risk of a wider war. Russia has backed mostly Christian Armenia, while Turkey, at odds with Russia as the two countries back opposite sides in the Syrian civil war, has supported Azerbaijan.

A mediating organization known as the Minsk Group, led by Russia, the United States and France and operating under the auspices of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, issued a statement praising the cease-fire. It said it welcomed diplomats’ “plans to undertake direct consultation with the sides as soon as possible.”

The European Union’s foreign policy chief, Federica Mogherini, issued a statement calling for observance of the cease-fire and saying that “a large-scale conflict is in the interest of no one.”

Characteristic of the fighting of the past days, and its risks in an unsteady region, Iran reported stray shells had landed on its territory near the south of the disputed region, which borders Iran.

In this region, the mountains taper into an area of rolling, grassy hills eerily dotted with the ruins of Azerbaijani villages, their inhabitants long ago dead or driven away as refugees from the last war.

Some of the clashes seesawed over these same ruins this time, however little there seemed left to fight over; all that remained were heaps of brick and tipped-over stones of Muslim graveyards, overgrown with thistles.

The Karabakh military escorted reporters to the area to see an impact from a stray rocket, a large so-called Smerch ground-to-ground rocket that had landed in one such ruined village, about a mile from the border with Iran.

“The policy of our country is aimed at a peaceful settlement,” Col. David Davidsyan, with the Karabakh military, said in an announcement of the cease-fire. “But the Karabakh army is ready to solve this question by force if needed.”

“Any truce is temporary,” one soldier, Pvt. Never Grigoryan, said in an interview at a Karabakh artillery position outside a ruined village, Marjalu. He stood amid a heap of empty, green wooden boxes that had held artillery shells.

“We will be ready,” he said.