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Incident

Armenia, Azerbaijan return to ceasefire

06 March 2008 07:24 (UTC +04:00)

After meetings in Baku with officials including Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev, Deputy Assistant Secretary of State Matthew Bryza is now heading to Armenia to try to encourage talks between the government and opposition figures who claim fraud in last monthâ€™s election.
Reached by telephone en route to Armeniaâ€™s capital, Yerevan, Bryza said that he intends to deliver a stern message in Armenia about recent violence between police and demonstrators that has left eight people dead and more than 100 injured.
"We simply deplore the violence," he said. "That simply canâ€™t be repeated."
Bryza said he intends to press the government to lift a state of emergency it declared Saturday and to ask both sides to move their dispute from the streets to the negotiating table.
Demonstrators have been rallying for presidential candidate Levon Ter-Petrosian, who has appealed to the countryâ€™s constitutional court to overturn the results of the Feb. 19 election. Ter-Petrosian finished a distant second to Prime Minister Serge Sarkisian in the official results.
Western observers issued an overall positive assessment of the election, but noted serious flaws, especially during the vote count.
The opposition says Sarkisian stole the election by resorting to vote-buying, ballot stuffing and pressuring media to skew coverage in his favor. Several opposition members said they were beaten on election day to prevent them from monitoring the vote. The government denies any wrongdoing.
After his meetings in Azerbaijan and a telephone call with Armenian Foreign Minister Vartan Oskanian on Tuesday, Bryza says he is satisfied that tensions in Nagorno-Karabakh have subsided.
"Based on everyone I have talked to it is clear that the shooting has stopped and the level of tension is decreasing," said Bryza, who has been the chief U.S. mediator to end the conflict in the region.
Nagorno-Karabakhâ€™s separatist ethnic Armenian â€œgovernmentâ€ is not recognized internationally, despite more than a decade of efforts by foreign mediators led by the United States, Russia and France to help reach a resolution.