Reuters Alert, UK
April 26 2005

Armenia conditionally backs genocide probe idea
26 Apr 2005 18:22:05 GMT

Source: Reuters

YEREVAN, April 26 (Reuters) – The president of ex-Soviet Armenia on
Tuesday conditionally backed a Turkish proposal to set up a joint
commission to investigate claims of mass genocide of Armenians 90
years ago.

Robert Kocharyan said the proposal would work only if better
relations were first established between Turkey and his country of
3.2 million lying on its eastern border.

The neighbours share a border but no diplomatic ties.

Armenia wants Ankara to recognise as genocide the killing of 1.5
million Armenians between 1915 and 1923. Armenians say their kin were
systematically exterminated by Ottoman Turkey’s rulers during and
soon after World War One.

Ankara says there was no plan to wipe out Armenians and that they
were victims of a war, not genocide.

Turkish Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan has suggested opening up the
countries’ state archives for experts from both countries to resolve
the issue, which is casting a shadow over Ankara’s ambitions to join
the European Union.

“We have proposed and continue to propose establishing, without any
preconditions, normal relations between our countries,” Kocharyan
wrote in reply to the Turkish plan.

“It is precisely in this context that an inter-governmental
commission can be created to discuss any single question between our
two countries or all questions with the goal of solving them and
achieving joint understanding.”

Turkey shut its border with Armenia in 1993 and cut diplomatic ties
in solidarity with Azerbaijan which was fighting a war with the
Armenians over the breakaway region of Nagorno-Karabakh.

Kocharyan added: “Your proposal to address the past cannot be
effective if it doesn’t relate to the present and future.”

Turkey’s Oct. 3 start date for talks on EU membership has put the
dispute firmly on the political agenda. France, home to an
influential 400,000-strong Armenian community, has promised to seek a
Turkish admission of genocide.

Erdogan, addressing an Istanbul conference, repeated his criticism of
politicians in Europe and North America who backed the Armenian
demands, saying their stance would “stoke resentment and hatred, not
be a basis for peace in the world”.

“If we have to face up to our history, we will do so. But other
countries must also face up to the same history,” he said.