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Stuck In 1915: How Turkey And Armenia Blew Their Big Chance At Peace

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  • Stuck In 1915: How Turkey And Armenia Blew Their Big Chance At Peace

    STUCK IN 1915 HOW TURKEY AND ARMENIA BLEW THEIR BIG CHANCE AT PEACE.
    THOMAS DE WAAL

    Foreign Policy
    April 15 2010

    Not many borders are closed in our globalized world, but the frontier
    between Armenia and Turkey is still a dead zone where the railroad
    stops. The closed border is a strange anomaly in the new Europe
    that stems from two old tragedies: the still unresolved conflict
    of the early 1990s between Armenia and Turkey's ally Azerbaijan,
    and the catastrophe of 1915 when the entire Armenian population of
    eastern Anatolia was deported or killed in the dying days of the
    Ottoman Empire.

    People on both sides of this closed border want it open. Last month I
    flew between the Armenian capital of Yerevan and Istanbul -- the two
    countries do at least have an air connection. The standard look of the
    Armenian businessmen packing the plane was slightly menacing at first.

    They all had dark leather jackets and hair cut short to the scalp,
    concealing a cheerful friendliness toward Turks. The two men sitting
    next to me wanted to be able to send the carpets, doors, and windows
    they currently buy in Turkey, and dispatch to Armenia in a roundabout
    route via Georgia, directly home across an open border.

    In Istanbul, the thoughtful Turkish academic Cengiz Aktar told me
    why he thinks that Turkey will be liberated if it faces up to the
    truth of what happened to its missing Armenians. Aktar initiated an
    Internet petition apologizing for the "Great Catastrophe" of 1915
    (adopting the Armenians' own phrase for the tragedy) and expressing
    sympathy for "my Armenian brothers and sisters." More than 30,000
    Turks have signed it -- remarkable for a country whose schoolbooks
    were, until recently, saying that Armenians killed Turks in the dying
    days of the Ottoman Empire and not the other way around. It is not an
    easy process, but the taboo on discussing the issue of what happened
    to the missing Armenians has now been lifted in Turkey.

    For a little while it seemed as if the governments in Yerevan and
    Ankara were also defying their region's dark historical determinism.

    Last October, the Armenian and Turkish presidents, Serzh Sargsyan and
    Abdullah Gul, moved to sign two protocols on normalizing relations,
    pledging that, once the documents were ratified by their countries'
    parliaments, the closed border would open within two months. Six months
    on, insecurities and local politics are again winning the day, and the
    protocols are in trouble. Turkish leaders are postponing ratification
    of the agreements. An April 12 meeting between Sargsyan and Turkey's
    powerful prime minister, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, in Washington on the
    sidelines of the Nuclear Security Summit, was a last-ditch attempt
    to broker a rescue, but the initial omens from it are not good.

    What has gone wrong? Ankara has gone cool on the process, saying
    it wants to see progress on the Armenian-Azerbaijani conflict over
    Nagorno-Karabakh -- even though the conflict is not mentioned in
    the protocols. The Turks clearly did not expect the furious reaction
    the rapprochement would have with Azerbaijan, the losing side in the
    conflict over the disputed province in the early 1990s. One-seventh
    of Azerbaijan's de jure territory is still under Armenian control, and
    in 1993, Turkey closed its border with Armenia in solidarity with its
    Turkic ally. Azerbaijan has been lobbying hard and effectively against
    the protocols, and its fears are understandable -- it is worried that
    if the Armenia-Turkey border opens, a key lever of influence on the
    Armenians to make concessions over Nagorno-Karabakh will be lost.

    That might be true in the short term, but in the long run the opening
    of the border would be bound to transform the South Caucasus region
    and have a positive effect on the deep-set Nagorno-Karabakh conflict
    as well. The Turks would become a neutral player in the Caucasus and
    have positive leverage there for the first time. Alas, this kind of
    long-term thinking is not the norm in this region.

    Another complication is the approach of April 24, the date marked as
    Armenian Genocide Day. As always, the coming anniversary is fraying
    tempers, as Armenians make their annual push for the U.S. president
    and Congress to term the 1915 killings "genocide," infuriating Turkey.

    Sargsyan has endured much criticism from diaspora Armenians for his
    rapprochement with Turkey. He is now under pressure to withdraw his
    signature from the protocols and ward off criticism at home and in
    the diaspora that he has allowed the Turks to string him along.

    A short-term fix is needed to overcome the immediate danger of a
    collapse in the process, one that the U.S. administration might have
    only a few days to try to engineer. But there is also a longer-term
    challenge here -- how to pull the South Caucasus region as a whole
    out of its historical cycle of mistrust and deadlock. Local actors
    appear trapped, afraid to break the recurring negative dynamics that
    keep borders and minds closed. A broader long-term strategy akin to
    the one that has slowly turned around the Balkans in the last decade
    and a half is needed here.

    That means making a much greater commitment to untying the biggest
    knot tangling up the area between the Black and Caspian Seas, the
    Armenian-Azerbaijani conflict over Nagorno-Karabakh. Currently the
    international resources being invested in the Nagorno-Karabakh peace
    process are much too small to make a difference. The conflict is
    dormant, but there is no room for complacency. Oil-rich Azerbaijan
    now spends more than $2 billion a year on its military budget, more
    than Armenia's entire annual budget. A few years down the line this
    could lead Azerbaijan into an attempt to reconquer Nagorno-Karabakh
    by force, triggering a regional war that would shake the area between
    Russia, Turkey, and Iran.

    The United States could also invest in some long-term thinking on
    the Armenian-Turkish issue, making reconciliation its strategic goal
    and not treating it as a problem that flashes up as a red light once
    a year, close to Armenian Genocide Day. In recent years, the issue
    of whether the U.S. president will use the "G word" -- genocide --
    in his annual April 24 statement has degraded what should be the
    commemoration of a historical tragedy into grubby political bargaining.

    A key date, the centenary of the Armenian holocaust in 2015, is
    glimmering over the horizon and can be a useful star for Turks,
    Armenians -- and President Barack Obama -- to be guided by. The
    Turkish government should recognize that it has five years to
    come up with a better response to the Armenian question before
    the whole world commemorates the 100th anniversary of the Armenian
    holocaust. By pushing the question five years into the future, Obama
    would be respectfully but gravely giving the Turkish government a
    chance to catch up with the growing debate in its own society. If
    on April 24 he says, "In five years' time I will be marking the
    centenary of the Great Catastrophe of 1915. I hope to be marking it
    with our Turkish friends and not without them," he will start to
    be a catalyst for reconciliation rather than just a player in the
    perpetual Armenian-Turkish quarrel.

    Thomas de Waal is senior associate for the Caucasus with the Carnegie
    Endowment for International Peace.
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