Turkish Press
April 27 2005

Kocharian Responds To Letter Of Erdogan

YEREVAN – Armenian President Robert Kocharian responded to the letter
of Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan who proposed to set up a joint
commission of historians to investigate the facts of 1915.

Mediamax agency based in Yerevan said on Tuesday that Kocharian
mainly told in the letter 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.”

Kocharian said that Armenia wanted to have diplomatic relations with
Turkey, to open the borders and to start the dialogue between the two
peoples. ”We have proposed and continue to propose establishing,
without any preconditions, normal relations between our countries,”
Kocharian wrote in his reply.

Commenting that it was mainly the responsibility of governments to
improve bilateral relations, not that of historians, Kocharian said
in the letter that ”your proposal to address the past cannot be
effective if it doesn’t relate to the present and future.”

Turkish Embassy in Tbilisi, Georgia sent the letter to Ankara.