YEREVAN, Dec 11 (AFP) - Armenian President Robert Kocharian held talks here on Monday with the co-chairman of the OSCE's Minsk group about the fate of Nagorny-Karabakh, the ethnic Armenian enclave within Azerbaijan.

The Minsk group, headed by the United States, Russia and France, has been tasked by the Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) with finding a solution to the Armenian-Azerbaijani dispute over the enclave.

More than 30,OOO people died and nearly a million people were displaced after the etnic Armenian majority in Nagorny-Karabakh launched a rebellion in 1988.

The US, Russian and French officals met Nagorny-Karabakh's "president," Arkady Gukasian, on Sunday.

After meeting the Armenian president, US envoy Carey Cavanaugh voiced concern at recent unrest in the Azerbaijani village of Nakhichevan, near the Armenian border.

"There has been fighting and periodically shooting all over the line of contact," Cavanaugh said. "We talked to President Kocharian about trying to find steps to prevent such incidents."

The French representative Jean-Jacques Gaillarde said that diplomatic efforts to find a negotiated settlement to the Nagorny-Karabakh dispute were "continuing intensely, and we hope they will succeed as soon as possible."

The three officials later left Yerevan for Baku where they met Azerbaijani President Heydar Aliyev late Monday.

In Baku, the OSCE envoys stressed that if the Karabakh conflict were to be resolved, it would greatly improve the chances of eventual stability in the volatile Caucasus region.

Nagorny-Karabakh declared its independence from Azerbaijan in 1991.

A ceasefire was signed in 1994, but the peace talks overseen by the OSCE remain deadlocked over Nagorny-Karabakh's future status within Azerbaijan.

mkh-neo/hb/db AFP

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