ITAR-TASS News Agency
TASS
April 26, 2005 Tuesday 2:37 PM Eastern Time

Armenia again offers unconditional normalization to Turkey

By Tigran Liloyan

YEREVAN

Armenia has offered unconditional normalization of the bilateral
relations to Turkey, and is offering that again, says a reply by
Armenian President Robert Kocharyan to Turkish Prime Minister Recep
Tayyip Erdogan.

The Armenian president’s press service released the message text on
Tuesday evening.

The April 10 letter by Erdogan suggested forming a group of
historians and other experts for studying the 1915 events (Armenian
genocide in the Ottoman Empire) in the archives of Armenia, Turkey
and third countries and informing the world about the research
results.

Kocharyan thinks that Armenia and Turkey can form “an
intergovernmental commission to discuss any problems the two
countries have for the sake of their settlement and achievement of
mutual understanding.”

“Being neighbors, we should try to find a way to future accord, so we
have been suggesting the establishment of diplomatic relations, the
opening of borders, and the beginning of a dialog between countries
and peoples from the very start,” Kocharyan said.

“There are neighbor countries with a difficult past, which is given
different interpretations, in the world, including Europe, but they
still have open borders, normal relations, diplomatic contacts and
each other’s representatives in their capitals while discussing
disputable issues,” he said.

The Turkish proposal “to review the past cannot be efficient if it is
not valid for today and tomorrow,” he said. “We need to create a
favorable political atmosphere for an efficient dialog. The
governments are in charge of the development of bilateral relations,
and we have no right to delegate this responsibility to historians.”