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Iran Says Ready to Negotiate with Azerbaijan on Caspian Dispute
Iranian Foreign Minister Kamal Kharazi on Friday expressed the country's readiness to negotiate with Azerbaijan for a settlement of the Caspian issue.
Iran has strongly protested Azerbaijan's "unauthorized" exploration in the Alborz oil field, which Tehran says is "in Iran's sector of the Caspian Sea" in cooperation with the BP Amoco and sent a warship to the area to warn against an exploration vessel.
Following BP Amoco's suspension of the research activities, Azeri President Geidar Aliyev said in a latest statement that his country is ready to settle the dispute with Iran through peaceful negotiations.
Kharazi welcomed Aliyev's statement, voicing Iran's readiness to hold talks with Azerbaijan, the official IRNA news agency reported.
It is beneficial for both Iran and Azerbaijan to try to consider the Caspian Sea as "an area of friendship and peace," he said, calling on the Caspian countries to avoid any actions which could lead to misunderstanding.
The Caspian Sea is estimated to have the world's third largest reserves of oil and gas, after the Persian Gulf and Siberia. Besides Iran and Azerbaijan, Russia, Kazakhstan and Turkmenistan are also among the five littoral states.
Iran and Turkmenistan have pushed for division of the sea into five equal sectors, while Azerbaijan, Russia and Kazakhstan contend that the sea floor should be divided into national sectors, which would leave Iran with the smallest slice.
Last June, the five states agreed that bilateral or trilateral agreement in the absence of a collective consensus will prove ineffective.
Iran has always being seeking to establish strong relations with its neighbors, Kharazi stressed, saying that the Caspian littoral states should work together to iron out differences through regular discussions so as to pave the way for the creation of a new legal status of the sea.
The question of how to divide the resource-rich Caspian Sea is supposed to be decided in an October summit of the five nations, which has been postponed several times since last April.
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