CLASH OF CIVILISATIONS: BELEAGUERED ARMENIANS IN TURKEY – AND A CLOSED BORDER WITH ARMENIA

Economist, UK
May 17 2007

FOR a seasoned diplomat, Hasan Sultanoglu Zeynalov, Azerbaijan’s
consul-general in Kars, eastern Turkey, is unusually indiscreet. He
openly complains about Naif Alibeyoglu, the mayor, who is promoting
dialogue between Turkey, Azerbaijan and their common enemy, Armenia,
just over the border. "I don’t believe in dialogue," Mr Zeynalov
snorts. He recently ordered his compatriots to boycott an arts
festival organised by the mayor after finding that "there were
Armenians too." Like his masters in Baku, Mr Zeynalov is unnerved at
the thought of his country’s biggest regional ally suddenly making
peace with Armenia.

He will have been cheered by the victory of Serzh Sarkisian, Armenia’s
nationalist prime minister, in a general election on May 12th. Mr
Sarkisian is said to have engineered a last-minute ban on Turkish
observers of the election. "I think it would be unnatural to receive
observing representatives from a country that does not even wish to
have a civilised official dialogue," he commented.

Mr Sarkisian’s hawkish views are echoed by Robert Kocharian, the
Armenian president, whom he is tipped to succeed in a presidential
election next year. Both men hail from Nagorno-Karabakh, a mountainous
enclave wrested by the Armenians from Azerbaijan in a vicious war in
the early 1990s. This prompted Turkey to seal its border (but not air
links) with Armenia in 1993. The effect on Kars’s economy has been
disastrous, which is why Mr Alibeyoglu is so keen to reopen the border.

Ethnic Azeris, who make up a third of his city’s 80,000 residents,
are less enthusiastic. They are likely to vote in droves for the
far-right MHP party in Turkey’s parliamentary election on July 22nd.

The party’s fortunes have risen on a tide of xenophobic nationalism
that has engulfed Turkey. Dismissing opinion polls that give Mr
Alibeyoglu’s AK party a big lead over its rivals, Oktay Aktas, the
local MHP boss, confidently predicts victory. He would like Turkey
to invade northern Iraq and to hang the Kurdish PKK rebel leader,
Abdullah Ocalan. He also says there is no question of easing the
blockade on Armenia-certainly not until it stops referring to his
region as western Armenia and calling the mass killings of Ottoman
Armenians in 1915 a genocide.

The sensitiveness of the genocide issue was reflected in January in the
killing of Hrant Dink, an ethnic-Armenian newspaper editor in Istanbul,
who had talked openly about it. The killer was a school dropout from
the port of Trabzon. Mr Dink’s lawyer, Ergin Cinmen, says there is
compelling evidence that the Istanbul police were given warning of a
planned attack at least a year ago, but they did nothing to protect
Mr Dink. This week Istanbul’s Armenians were shocked once again by a
letter sent from Trabzon warning them to defend Turkey against the
genocide claims or "face the consequences". It was delivered to an
Armenian primary school.

Such threats have dispelled the surge of goodwill that followed a
huge turnout at Mr Dink’s funeral and the reopening in March of an old
Armenian church restored by Turkey’s AK government. Etyen Mahcupyan,
who replaced Mr Dink at his newspaper, says some of his kin are now
talking of leaving Turkey for good. The border may stay closed for
many more years.