TURKEY ASKS AZERBAIJAN TO EXPLAIN ALLEGED MISTREATMENT OF ETHNIC ARMENIAN MUSICIAN
By Suzan Fraser, Associated Press Writer

Associated Press Worldstream
December 26, 2006 Tuesday 7:29 PM GMT

Turkey has asked its close ally Azerbaijan for information on the
alleged mistreatment and expelling of a Turkish musician who is of
Armenian descent, a Foreign Ministry official said Tuesday.

Murat Bedikyan a pianist with Eurovision song contest winner Sertap
Erener’s band accused officials in Azerbaijan of mistreating him and
unfairly ousting him from the country on arrival for a concert Dec. 19,
according to the Anatolia news agency.

Bedikyan was forced to return to Istanbul and could not join his
band. He insisted he was singled out and mistreated despite his
Turkish citizenship, because he is a member of Turkey’s minority
Armenian community.

Turkey had formally requested information on Bedikyan’s allegations
from Azerbaijan’s Foreign Ministry, according to a Turkish Foreign
Ministry official, speaking on condition of anonymity because of rules
that bar civil servants from speaking to journalists without prior
authorization. A similar request had been made with the Azerbaijani
Embassy in Ankara, the official said.

The ex-Soviet republics of Azerbaijan and Armenia are at loggerheads
over the mountainous region of Nagorno Karabakh in Azerbaijan that
has been under the control of Armenian and ethnic-Armenian forces
since a 1994 cease-fire. The six-year separatist conflict killed
about 30,000 people and drove about 1 million from their homes,
including many of the region’s ethnic Azeris.

The region’s final status remains unresolved and years of talks
under the auspices of international mediators have brought few
visible results.

Turkey has close ties to Azerbaijan, with which it shares an ethnic
and linguistic heritage. It refuses to have diplomatic relations with
Armenia because of Yerevan’s unresolved conflict with Azerbaijan.

Relations are further complicated over the World War I-era killings of
Armenians. Armenians say that Ottoman Turks slaughtered 1.5 million
Armenians in a planned genocide. Turkey vehemently denies that the
mass killings were genocide, saying the death toll is inflated and
Armenians were killed in civil unrest as the Ottoman Empire collapsed.