ARMENIAN FOREIGN MINISTER TRIES TO FAMILIARIZE HIS TURKISH COLLEAGUE WITH ARMENIA’S POSITION ON NAGORNO-KARABAKH CONFLICT

arminfo
2007-06-29 16:27:00

At the June 29 press-conference, Armenian Foreign Minister Vardan
Oskanyan said that he tried to familiarize his Turkish colleague with
Armenia’s position on the Nagorno- Karabakh conflict during a meeting
with Abdullah Gul in Istanbul on June 25. The meeting was held beyond
the scope of the BSEC summit.

According to the Minister, the meeting with Gul covered chiefly two
group of questions: the bilateral relations, to be more precise, the
lack of the relations, and the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict. During the
meeting V.Oskanyan confirmed Armenia’s position about willingness to
normalize Armenian-Turkish relations without preconditions. At the same
time, the Minister recalled that Turkey knows Azeri position better,
and Oskanyan presented Armenia’s position for Ankara’s assertion to be
more objective. As for Turkey’s position on the bilateral relations,
it has undergone no changes. Though there are behind-the- scenes
conversations about possible changes of Ankara’s policy after the
election in Turkey, V.Oskanyan doesn’t believe these rumors. "There
were such conversations before, too, but there has been no progress
yet," the Minister noted.

V.Oskanyan told about his meetings with the Serbian, Georgian and Greek
Foreign Ministers in Istanbul. He also expressed his impressions from
communication with media representatives. "As soon as I arrived in
Istanbul, I received so many requests for interview that we decided to
hold a press-conference. Over forty Turkish journalists participated
in it, and the press-conference was interesting enough," the Minister
noted. According to him, the journalists’ questions concerned mainly
the Armenian-Turkish relations and the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict.