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Turkey Steps Up Efforts To Rebuild Armenia Relations

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  • Turkey Steps Up Efforts To Rebuild Armenia Relations

    TURKEY STEPS UP EFFORTS TO REBUILD ARMENIA RELATIONS
    By Toby Vogel

    European Voice
    http://www.europeanvoice.com/article/importe d/turkey-steps-up-efforts-to-rebuild-armenia-relat ions/64817.aspx
    May 7 2009

    A roadmap for restoring relations between Armenia and Turkey could
    fundamentally change political alignments in the Caucasus region.

    On 22 April, the foreign ministries of Turkey, Armenia and Switzerland
    issued a joint statement consisting of just four sentences. It said
    that with the help of Swiss mediators, Turkey and Armenia had agreed
    a "comprehensive framework" for restoring relations and drawn up
    "a roadmap" to guide the process. That short statement held out
    the promise of a fundamental realignment of political forces in the
    south Caucasus.

    The roadmap was the product of two years of secret diplomacy. Its
    contents have not been made public, but a first step foresees the
    restoration of diplomatic relations between Turkey and Armenia. A
    second step would be to open the border, ending an isolation that
    has driven landlocked Armenia into Russia's embrace. In a third
    step, a joint commission of historians would look into the events
    of 1915, when the Ottoman authorities rounded up more than a million
    Armenians. Hundreds of thousands were killed or died on forced marches
    into the Syrian desert.

    A rapprochement between the two countries had been expected since
    last September, when Abdullah Gul, Turkey's president and a leading
    figure in the ruling Justice and Development party (AKP), visited
    Armenia's capital Yerevan - the first-ever visit by a Turkish leader
    to the country.

    "Swiss diplomacy has been crucial," says Sinan Ulgen, chairman of the
    Centre for Economics and Foreign Policy Studies in Istanbul. "This
    has been one of the surprises."

    Relations between the two countries soured in 2007, when a Swiss court
    found a Turkish politician guilty of denying that the Armenians were
    victims of a genocide in 1915.

    Turkey still refuses to acknowledge the genocide, saying instead that
    more historical research is needed. Agreeing to set up a committee to
    study the matter is therefore a major concession by Armenia. It has
    argued that current historical knowledge is sufficient to determine
    that a genocide took place - a view with which most foreign scholars
    agree.

    The joint statement was issued just ahead of 24 April, which is
    commemorated by Armenians around the world as the day when their
    suffering began in 1915, with the arrest of community leaders by the
    Ottoman authorities.

    Genocide dilemma The genocide question is of huge symbolic importance
    to all Armenians. The shared memory of the massacres of 1915-17 is a
    defining feature of Armenian national identity. But it is the status
    of Nagorno-Karabakh - an Armenian enclave inside Turkic-speaking
    Azerbaijan - that has the most immediate implications for regional
    stability and for the existing web of alliances in the south Caucasus.

    The Turkish-Armenian border has been closed since the early 1990s,
    when Turkey imposed a blockade on Armenia in retaliation for Armenian
    gains in a war with Turkey's ally Azerbaijan. Armenia occupied not
    only Nagorno-Karabakh but also a land-bridge linking it to Armenia,
    and large swathes of other territory inside Azerbaijan.

    Predictably, Azerbaijan's reaction to the Turkish-Armenian
    rapprochement has been negative: it fears that any normalisation
    will remove the main incentive for Armenia to withdraw from occupied
    territory.

    The absence of explicit references to Nagorno-Karabakh has heightened
    Azeri suspicions of being sold out by their Turkish protector. The
    Azeri reaction and a possible nationalist backlash once the roadmap is
    debated in Turkey's parliament might yet lead to such a reference being
    inserted in the final text. This will not be easy, as Serzh Sargsyan,
    the president of Armenia, has also come in for nationalist criticism.

    But acknowledged or not, there is at least a 'soft link' between
    Turkish-Armenian rapprochement and any future solution to the
    Nagorno-Karabakh problem, according to Ulgen. The two processes need
    to go in parallel; otherwise, the risk of failure is too high.

    Energy game Relations between Turkey and Azerbaijan are already
    difficult because Turkey wants to act as a middleman rather than
    merely a transit country in the sale of Azeri gas to the EU through
    the planned Nabucco pipeline. This has prompted Ilham Aliyev, the
    president of Azerbaijan, to consider selling the gas to Russia instead,
    via existing trans-Caucasian pipelines, as a back-up option if Nabucco
    fails to materialise.

    The rapprochement with Armenia is part of a broader Turkish strategy
    to establish friendly relations with all of its neighbours, according
    to Ulgen. The chief architect of the strategy, Ahmet Davutoglu -
    a professor of international relations who had been serving as
    Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan's foreign policy adviser
    - was named foreign minister last Friday (1 May). This is a clear
    sign that Erdogan is determined to continue pushing for peace with
    Turkey's neighbours.
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