U.S. TO AGAIN PRESS FOR TURKISH-ARMENIAN RAPPROCHEMENT
By Emil Danielyan
Radio Liberty, Czech Republic
Oct 24 2007
The United States hopes to defuse the latest surge in Turkish-Armenian
tensions and will make a fresh attempt to help normalize Turkey’s
strained relationship with Armenia, a senior U.S. official said
on Wednesday.
Deputy Assistant Secretary of State Matthew Bryza said the controversy
surrounding the possible passage of a U.S. Congressional resolution
recognizing as genocide the mass killings of Armenians in Ottoman
Turkey underscores the need for the two neighboring states to have
diplomatic relations and an open border.
"This incident has demonstrated in America, Armenia and Turkey how
important it is that there be a serious initiative to fully normalize
Armenian-Turkish relations," he told RFE/RL in Yerevan.
Bryza, who was visiting the Armenian capital in his capacity as the
U.S. co-chair of the OSCE Minsk Group, said he will travel to Ankara on
Thursday to discuss the matter with Turkish leaders on the margins of a
Black Sea economic forum. "One of my own main goals is to explore the
possibility of rejuvenating efforts to bring the countries together,"
he said.
"The resolution will either pass or won’t pass. Either way, there
is still going to be this problem out there that he is behind the
whole controversy over the resolution. We have to get the two sides
together," he added.
Official Ankara has reacted furiously to the draft resolution’s
approval by a key House of Representatives committee earlier this
month, warning that its passage by the full chamber would not only
damage U.S.-Turkish ties but have negative consequences for Armenia.
Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan indicated on October 16
that his government would be even more unwilling to unconditionally
normalize ties with Yerevan.
"Those who expect openings from Turkey will be left alone with their
problems," Erdogan said. "They will have to pay the cost of their
hostility towards an important country like Turkey."
"I don’t understand what the Turks are saying," Armenian Prime Minister
Serzh Sarkisian told the Associated Press news agency in Washington
on Tuesday. "We have no relations now. We cannot harm something that
is non existent."
While reaffirming Yerevan’s support for the House bill, Sarkisian
stressed that his country does not view genocide recognition as a
precondition for improving relations with Turkey.
Successive Turkish governments have made the reopening of the
Turkish-Armenian border and establishment of diplomatic relations
conditional on a settlement of the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict and a
halt to the decades-long campaign for international recognition of
the Armenian genocide. The U.S. has for years tried unsuccessfully
get them to drop those preconditions. It has also urged Armenia to
explicitly rule out territorial claims to Turkey.
In Bryza’s words, many officials in Ankara now recognize the need to
reconsider Turkey’s policy towards Armenia. "It is outrageous that the
[Turkish-Armenian] border is closed," the official said. "I think
that there are a lot of people in the upper reaches of the Turkish
government who recognize that an open border would change the strategic
map here in a very positive way. I hope that we can convince everybody
in the region, including in Azerbaijan, that that’s indeed the case."