Armenian president wants “normal relations” with Turkey

RTR Russia TV, Moscow
23 Apr 05

Armenian President Robert Kocharyan has said there are no relations
between Armenia and Turkey at the moment and blamed Turkey for
this. He added, however, that Armenia intended to build normal
relations with its neighbours, including Turkey.

In an interview on Russia TV channel on the eve of the 90th
anniversary of the genocide against Armenians in the Ottoman Empire,
Kocharyan said: “Armenia simply does not have any relations with
Turkey at the moment and that is not our fault.”

Kocharyan told the presenter of the Zerkalo current affairs programme,
Nikolay Svanidze, that it was strange that “malice has been preserved
by the side responsible for the crime and not by the victim of that
crime”. The president went on to say that the Armenians viewed the
history of relations with Turkey “with bitterness but without hatred”
and that they could not quite understand Turkey which is not simply
denying its own past, but which is blockading modern Armenia.

Kocharyan said this situation could be explained by “the state of the
modern Turkish society and evaluation by the society of that difficult
period of its own history: the fall of the Ottoman Empire and very
many processes that occurred there because of that fall”. Kocharyan
confirmed that he had recently received a letter from the Turkish
prime minister, but added that the letter did not contain much that
would help tackle the problem of relations between the two countries.

Answering a question as to what the recognition of the genocide would
mean for the Armenians, Kocharyan said that his nation wanted justice
and not in the sense of some compensation, but first of all, in moral
sense. He added that there probably were legal grounds for seeking
compensation, but the world had moved on and that it was necessary to
look into the future and not into the past.