New Zealand Herald, New Zealand
Nov 19 2004

Armenian president urges Turkey to open border

BERLIN – Armenian President Robert Kocharyan urged Turkey to abandon
its 11-year blockade of the southern Caucasus country, a German paper
reported on Thursday.

Turkey shut its border with the tiny ex-Soviet republic in 1993 to
show solidarity with oil-rich Azerbaijan, which is in a long and
bitter territorial dispute with Armenia.

“Turkey is blockading Armenia, one can only call that harassment,”
the Berlin-based daily Die Welt quoted Kocharyan as saying in an
interview to be published on Friday.

Relations between Armenia and Turkey have long been strained because
Armenia says some 1.5 million of their people were slaughtered by
Ottoman Turks between 1915 and 1923. Turkey denies accusations of
genocide.

Kocharyan told the paper Armenia would not insist Turkey admit to
genocide for talks on normalising relations to proceed.

“For us, the recognition of the genocide of Armenians in 1915 by
Turks is certainly very important, but it will never be a condition
for the development of bilateral relations,” Die Welt quoted him as
saying.

“If Ankara recognised this fact, it would be a significant step
forward in the direction of normalising relations,” he told the
paper.

Armenia does not recognise the 1921 Kars treaty which fixed its
border with Turkey and some Armenian nationalists refer to parts of
eastern Turkey as “western Armenia”.