ARMENIAN PAPER COMPLAINS OF POOR RECEPTION AT ISTANBUL-HOSTED NATO SUMMIT

Aykakan Zhamanak, Yerevan
29 Jun 04

An Armenian delegation headed by Foreign Minister Vardan Oskanyan
arrived in Istanbul yesterday (28 June) to attend the NATO summit.

The most noteworthy among Oskanyan’s meetings in Istanbul yesterday
was his bilateral meeting with Turkey’s Foreign Minister Abdullah Gul
and later a trilateral meeting with Gul and Azerbaijan’s Foreign
Minister (Elmar) Mammadyarov.

But before touching on these meetings, let us present some not so
pleasant facts: the members of the Armenian delegation were very much
displeased when at Istanbul’s Kemal Ataturk airport nobody came up to
the landed Armenian plane for about 15 minutes. The Oskanyan-Gul
meeting was postponed at Turkey’s request and took place several hours
earlier than scheduled. For this reason, Armenian journalists did not
have an opportunity to cover it, as they were moving from one
checkpoint to another in central Istanbul and could not enter the
venue of the NATO summit. And finally, the Armenian delegation was
very displeased when before his trilateral meeting with Gul and
Mammadyarov, Vardan Oskanyan had to wait for a while in the hall of
Hotel Hyatt to be invited to the meeting.

By the way, in the same hotel, at the same time meetings of different
delegations were taking place, but we did not meet any minister who
had to sit and wait. This kind of treatment of the Armenian delegation
made senior members of the Armenian delegation angry as well. In
particular, one of them said that the Turkish leadership had focused
its entire attention on the arrival of a 1,200-strong delegation from
the USA, and to justify the attitude towards Armenia, he added that
some countries had not even received a flag to stick at their
delegations’ cars.

Anyway, one of the major issues on the agenda of the Oskanyan-Gul
meeting was the opening of the Armenian-Turkish border. Commenting on
this meeting, Oskanyan said that in his view, Turkey has a great
desire to open the Armenian-Turkish border but the right political
time has not yet come. As for the Oskanyan-Gul-Mammadyarov trilateral
meeting, it was the fourth one held in this format, but the first one
with the participation of Mammadyarov. The ministers declined to
answer journalists’ questions after the meeting. Here are Vardan
Oskanyan’s answers to some of our questions:

(Aykakan Zhamanak correspondent) Mr Oskanyan, you have said more than
once that if during these meetings Turkey takes on the role of a
mediator, you will reject that. Today Turkey was the initiator of this
meeting. Was it really just the initiator?

(Vardan Oskanyan) There was absolutely no allusion to mediation, the
three countries were talking with one another on equal terms since
they have interests in the South Caucasus. I think it was really a
useful discussion because of its format.

(Correspondent) Did you talk during the meeting about returning seven
districts to Azerbaijan and opening the Armenian-Azerbaijani railway,
as the Azerbaijani and Turkish press reported earlier?

(Oskanyan) No, we did not. We talked about Nagornyy Karabakh, but we
did not go into details. We simply touched on the Prague meeting, and
the Azerbaijani foreign minister and I expressed certain views
concerning the issue.

(Correspondent) In Armenia some people are very much inspired by
(Armenian President) Robert Kocharyan’s speech at PACE (Parliamentary
Assembly of the Council of Europe). At your meetings here did you feel
the influence of this speech in a positive sense?

(Oskanyan) You know, since we did not go into details of the Karabakh
issue today, I noticed no influence.

(Passage omitted: security measures in place in Istanbul)