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Turkey & Armenia Inch Forward

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  • Turkey & Armenia Inch Forward

    TURKEY & ARMENIA INCH FORWARD

    Los Angeles Times
    September 16, 2008

    Over soccer, the two countries' leaders begin to work on the future
    instead of getting mired in the past.

    The soccer was disappointing: A scrappy game on a rough pitch whipped
    by turbulent winds that sent many a pass askew. But the Armenia-Turkey
    World Cup qualifier in Yerevan, Armenia's capital, on Sept. 6 was an
    almost unbelievable event. The 2-0 victory for the Turks was beside
    the point. All eyes were on the two countries' presidents, sitting
    together in the stadium -- albeit behind bulletproof glass -- in a
    brave attempt to bury one of the Caucasus' most bitter legacies.

    This was the first visit by a Turkish head of state to Armenia, and
    it was all the more remarkable for taking place less than a month
    after Russia's invasion of Georgia set the Caucasus on a knife's
    edge. It's part of a realignment in which Turkey, caught between its
    NATO membership and its energy reliance on Russia, is pushing for
    a regional diplomatic initiative that would bring together Russia,
    Georgia, Azerbaijan, Armenia and Turkey.

    Within that context, Armenians and Turks are seizing a chance to
    stop their futures being mortgaged to history. That includes the
    dispute about the Armenians' demand that the Turks recognize there
    was a genocide in the Ottoman Empire in 1915 that killed 1.5 million
    Armenians, many of them women and children. Turkey, which succeeded
    to that empire in 1923, agrees that hundreds of thousands died as a
    result of massacres, forced marches, famine and disease, but it says
    that this was World War I, that many Turks were killed by Armenians
    and that the Armenian militia was openly aligned with the invading
    forces of the Ottomans' enemy, the Russians.

    It is not just the Armenian side that has to overcome
    bitterness. Armenian attacks from 1973 to 1994 killed 42 members of
    the Turkish foreign ministry and their families all over the world,
    including, in 1973 and 1982, Turkish consuls general in Santa Barbara
    and Los Angeles. Turkey also closed its border with Armenia in sympathy
    with Azerbaijan during the 1988-94 Nagorno-Karabakh war, in which
    Armenians, seeking self-determination for that Armenian-majority
    enclave, seized more than 15% of Azerbaijan and drove more than
    700,000 Azeris from their homes (more than 400,000 Armenians also
    fled or were driven from Azerbaijan).

    The two sides do not have formal diplomatic relations, but Turkish
    President Abdullah Gul's visit to Yerevan, at the invitation of
    Armenian President Serzh Sargsyan, did not come out of the blue.

    Turkey has in recent years pushed its idea that the genocide issue
    should be turned over to a mutually agreed, neutral commission
    of historians, although many Armenians in the diaspora, mainly
    in California, France and Lebanon, want full recognition of the
    genocide to come before normalized diplomatic relations. In April,
    Armenia elected Sargsyan, who began to stress Armenia's desire for
    normalization. Formerly secret meetings between Armenian and Turkish
    diplomats are now moving forward faster and with greater transparency.

    Turkey has many reasons for reaching out to Armenia beyond stability
    in the Caucasus. Seeking regional influence, it is working to improve
    relations with all its 10 difficult neighbors, and notably with Cyprus,
    where it is backing progress toward a settlement to reunite Turkish
    Cypriots with the rest of the Mediterranean island. It wants to show
    that it can resolve disputes, which will bolster its negotiations to
    join the European Union. It also needs moral points in its struggle
    with the Armenian lobby, which will next year almost certainly try
    again to win U.S. official recognition of an Armenian genocide.

    Trouble in the neighborhood is also concentrating minds in Armenia,
    which spun free of the Soviet Union in 1991. Its future no longer
    seems secure, given its near total strategic dependence on a newly
    assertive Russia, a border with a difficult Iran and the fact that 70%
    of its trade passes through unstable Georgia.

    There were fewer Armenian boos and hisses for Gul in the soccer
    stadium than might have been expected, nationalist parties muted their
    opposition, and the several hundred protesters along his motorcade
    route simply held placards demanding genocide recognition. Participants
    said real warmth characterized the relations between the officials,
    who rediscovered how close Turkish and Armenian cuisine and social
    culture remain.

    In Turkey, meanwhile, almost all major media commentators cheered
    Gul's decision to travel to Armenia, and two-thirds of Turks told
    pollsters they approved. A top retired Turkish ambassador publicly
    suggested that Turkey would do well to exchange ambassadors, open
    the border, apologize for the events of 1915 and offer compensation
    and even citizenship for the descendants of those expelled.

    A dispute that has done Turkey and the Caucasus so much harm may have
    begun to abate. As Gul put it: "We are all the children of the same
    Earth, with memories that are both bitter and sweet."

    Hugh Pope is author of "Turkey Unveiled: a History of Modern Turkey"
    and is Turkey project director for International Crisis Group.
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