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Tiptoeing The Turkish Tightrope: Sargsyan Sees Mixed Reaction At Hom

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  • Tiptoeing The Turkish Tightrope: Sargsyan Sees Mixed Reaction At Hom

    TIPTOEING THE TURKISH TIGHTROPE: SARGSYAN SEES MIXED REACTION AT HOME AFTER MOSCOW STATEMENTS
    Aris Ghazinyan

    ArmeniaNow.com
    Armenia
    01 July, 2008

    President Serzh Sargsyan's statements on Armenia's relations with
    Turkey made while on a recent official visit to Russia elicited a
    negative reaction from the opposition and at least one pro-government
    party at home.


    Meeting representatives of the Armenian Diaspora in Moscow early last
    week, Sargsyan, in particular, unveiled his plans to invite Turkish
    President Abdullah Gul to Yerevan in September to watch together an
    upcoming World Cup qualifier between the two countries' national teams.


    The move was received enthusiastically by U.S. Deputy Assistant
    Secretary of State for European and Eurasian Affairs Matthew Bryza,
    who is the American co-chair of the Minsk Group of the Organization
    for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE), an international format
    seeking a negotiated peace in Nagorno-Karabakh. The proposal was also
    positively assessed by Bryza's wife, Zeyno Baran, a Turkish-American
    scholar who currently heads the Center for Eurasian Policy at the
    Hudson Institute.


    The top-selling Turkish daily Hurriyet wrote about "a positive raction
    in Ankara" but reported that no official invitiation had been received
    in Turkey yet.


    However, it is Sargsyan's statement in which he in principle accepted
    Turkey's proposal on forming a panel of historians to review the
    events of early last century that raised most disgruntled voices.


    "We are not against the establishment of such a commission, but only
    when the border between our states is opened," Sargsyan said.


    The Turkish government's proposal in 2005 to form a joint commisison
    of historians to review the correspondence of the early 20th century
    events in Ottoman Turkey to the notion "genocide" was rejected as
    unacceptable by Armenia's then president Robert Kocharyan.


    And now Armenia's main opposition groups accuse the head of state
    of questioning the very fact of genocide by accepting the Turkish
    proposal in principle.


    The Armenian Revolutionary Federation (ARF), a coalition partner with
    Sargsyan's Republican Party, also expressed its position on Sargsyan's
    statements, reiterating its hard line on relations with Turkey.


    "I think that if the president of Turkey visits Yerevan, at least one
    part of our society will express its attitude," ARF Bureau spokesman
    Giro Manoyan said in an interview with RFE/RL Monday.


    Manoyan also said that they had received "the necessary explanation
    and clarification" from the president regarding his statement on the
    possibility of establishing an Armenian-Turkish commission.


    "But in any case, our approach is that there was no need to make such
    statements and create this confusion in the first place," Manoyan said.


    Earlier, Foreign Minister Edward Nalbandyan said that Sargsyan's
    statement "does not mean that Armenia renounces former president
    Robert Kocharyan's step on including the Genocide issue on the foreign
    policy agenda."


    And Sargsyan's press secretary Samvel Farmanyan argued that the
    president's words were clear and left no room for misunderstanding:
    "There was a proposal from Turkey to set up an expert commission to
    study historical facts concerning the genocide. We are not against
    any studies, even studies of patently obvious and widely recognized
    realities. However, the formation of such a commission would be logical
    only after establishing diplomatic relations and opening borders."
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