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Armenia And Turkey: The Truce In Need Of A Rescue

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  • Armenia And Turkey: The Truce In Need Of A Rescue

    ARMENIA AND TURKEY: THE TRUCE IN NEED OF A RESCUE
    By Henri J. Barkey and Thomas de Waal

    Los Angeles Times
    http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/la-oe-ba rkey5-2010feb05,0,1822351.story?track=rss
    Feb 5 2010

    Opinion

    They have a chance to make peace over their troubled past and move
    forward -- or balk and leave themselves, and their region, worse off
    than before.

    For a while, it looked like the start of a great reconciliation.

    Armenia and Turkey have lived beneath the vast shadow of the mass
    murder of Armenians in eastern Turkey during World War I, and to this
    day they maintain no diplomatic ties. But in October, the Armenian and
    Turkish foreign ministers met in Switzerland and signed two protocols
    to set up relations, open their common border -- closed since 1993
    -- and begin addressing the painful disputes that divide them. Each
    nation's governments must still ratify the agreements. The United
    States, with its large Armenian American community and strategic
    alliance with Turkey, threw its weight behind the deal.

    But this great truce is already in need of a rescue, and if it breaks
    down, we will end up in a worse place than where we started. In
    January, Turkey showed signs of having cold feet. Its foreign ministry
    objected to a judgment by the Armenian constitutional court supporting
    the protocols on the grounds that they are consistent with the founding
    principles of the state, which commit it to pursuing recognition of
    the 1915 killings as genocide.

    The endorsement of the court, which the U.S. government welcomed,
    actually opens the way for the Armenian parliament to ratify the
    protocols. Turkey's move was a fairly transparent device to put the
    brakes on the process.

    Why is Turkey trying to backtrack? Its government agreed to the
    protocols, in part because it wanted to prevent the U.S.

    administration and Congress from passing a resolution describing
    the Armenian massacres as genocide. But Ankara was surprised by the
    vehemence of the opposition the deal generated both at home and in
    its ally, Azerbaijan, which lost a conflict with the Armenians over
    the disputed region of Nagorno-Karabakh in the early 1990s.

    The text of the protocols does not explicitly mention Nagorno-Karabakh,
    but the dispute looms large in the background.

    Turkey originally shut the border with Armenia in 1993; the Armenians
    captured an Azerbaijani province during the Nagorno-Karabakh war. When
    the accord was signed last year, the Turks hoped that there would be
    a breakthrough in the peace talks over the conflict, but that hope is
    fading. Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan has boxed himself
    in by proclaiming that the protocols will not be implemented until
    Armenia withdraws from occupied Azerbaijani territory.

    A rapprochement would be good news for Armenia, which would see
    its main border to the West opened and an end to years of regional
    isolation. Yet Armenian President Serge Sarkisian also faces
    unexpectedly strong opposition. In the diaspora, there are loud
    complaints that the provisions to confirm the existing Armenian-Turkish
    border and set up a joint historians' commission on the massacres
    relieve pressure on Ankara to own up to the Armenian genocide.

    Yet the world would never tolerate a redrawing of Turkey's borders --
    even Josef Stalin failed to accomplish that in the flush of victory
    over the Nazis in 1945 -- and the Turkish government is unlikely to
    recognize the Armenian genocide with a gun pressed to its head.

    Turkey's own growing internal debate about the crimes of 1915 is
    a much surer road to their eventual acknowledgment than political
    lobbying from abroad.

    On the Armenian side, it would be political suicide for Sarkisian to
    make a major concession over Nagorno-Karabakh -- such as a unilateral
    withdrawal from occupied Azerbaijani land. Yet it is not unreasonable
    for the Turks to expect some progress. After all, they closed the
    Armenian border in solidarity with their Azerbaijani brethren, who
    would be furious if it were reopened without any move forward on the
    Nagorno-Karabakh dispute. At the very least, Azerbaijan could retaliate
    by charging the Turks higher gas prices and favoring Russian export
    routes over the Nabucco gas pipeline projected to traverse Turkey en
    route to Europe.

    Allowing these protocols to fail would unleash a destructive chain
    of events. An aggrieved U.S. Congress might press ahead with a
    genocide resolution, a move that would provoke a strong anti-American
    backlash in Turkey. The already faltering peace process over the
    Nagorno-Karabakh conflict -- the major issue impeding peaceful
    development in the South Caucasus -- would be hit hard, and calls
    for war could resume in Azerbaijan.

    But Armenia can take smaller steps to break the deadlock. Owing to
    the geography of this region, everyone suffers. Azerbaijan also has
    an isolated territory that suffers economically -- the exclave of
    Nakhichevan, separated from the rest of Azerbaijan by an unfriendly
    Armenia, its road and rail links severed. As a gesture of goodwill,
    the Yerevan government could take steps to ease the blockade of
    Nakhichevan in parallel with the opening of the Armenian-Turkish
    border. The Armenians could also begin work on rehabilitating the
    long-defunct railway line that once connected Azerbaijan, Armenia,
    Nakhichevan and Turkey. It is a sad symbol of the closed borders and
    suspicions that cripple this region, but one day it could be a major
    east-west transport route. The Turks would be wise to hail such an
    initiative as a success and move on with ratifying the protocols.

    More broadly, better relations with Armenia offer Turkey a chance
    to lift the burden of history from its shoulders. Turkey's ambitious
    foreign policy, with its goal of "zero problems with its neighbors"
    and becoming the central power in its region, will come to nothing
    if its enmity with Armenia endures. Tiny Armenia may be dwarfed by
    Turkey's size and clout, but it can lay claim to a moral imperative.

    Henri J. Barkey is a professor of international relations at Lehigh
    University and a visiting senior scholar at the Carnegie Endowment
    for International Peace, where Thomas de Waal is a senior associate
    on the Caucasus.
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