Soccer falls victim to tension in Turkish-Armenian relations

RIA Novosti, Russia
June 4 2005

BELGRADE, June 4 (RIA Novosti, Nikolai Paskhin) – Turkish authorities
refused to grant an air corridor on Thursday night for a plane
carrying Macedonian national soccer team to Yerevan for a 2006 World
Cup qualifying match against Armenia scheduled for June 4.

The plane spent about an hour and a half in Turkish air space but
when it had less than a hundred kilometers left to reach the Armenian
border, the aircraft was suddenly ordered to return to Macedonia’s
capital Skopje.

Utrenski Vestnik, a Macedonian daily, wrote on Friday that, to justify
its actions, Ankara claimed that “the aircraft crew did not have the
documents required for flying over Turkey”.

Other Macedonian media assumed that the real cause of the incident
lied in strained Turkish-Armenian relations (Yerevan demands that
Ankara apologize for the large-scale massacre, branded by Yerevan
as genocide against the Armenian population of eastern territories
of the Ottoman Turkey in 1915-1917, when up to 1.5 million Armenians
were exterminated).

Currently, the Macedonian Soccer Federation is looking for alternative
routes (bypassing Turkey) to send its national team to Armenia.