TURKEY OFFERS "DIALOGUE" TO ARMENIA
By Emil Danielyan

Eurasia Daily Monitor, DC
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May 20 2008

Turkey has offered to enter into a "dialogue" with neighboring Armenia
that would aim at improving the historically strained relations
between the two nations. The diplomatic overtures have prompted a
positive response from Armenian leaders, raising fresh hopes for the
elimination of a major source of geopolitical tension in the South
Caucasus. Ankara, however, has given no official indication so far that
it is ready to drop its preconditions for normalizing bilateral ties.

Turkish President Abdullah Gul was one of the first foreign leaders
to congratulate Serzh Sarkisian on his highly controversial victory
in Armenia’s February 21 presidential election. "I hope your new duty
will provide the necessary atmosphere for normalizing ties between
the Turkish and Armenian peoples who have proved for centuries that
they can live side by side in peace and harmony," Gul wrote to the new
Armenian leader (AP, February 21). Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip
Erdogan and Foreign Minister Ali Babacan sent similar congratulatory
letters to their newly appointed Armenian counterparts in late April,
both of them stressing the need for a "dialogue."

According to the Armenian government’s press service, Erdogan also
spoke of unspecified "certain steps" that could be taken to normalize
Turkish-Armenian relations. "Admittedly we have problems, some of which
date back 100 years," Babacan told reporters in Ankara on April 21,
"but the only way of overcoming these problems is through dialogue. Our
doors are open to dialogue in this new period" (AP, April 21).

"I would like to reaffirm the Armenian government’s commitment to
constructive dialogue and the establishment of normal relations without
preconditions," Armenia’s Prime Minister Tigran Sarkisian said in a
written reply to Erdogan. Armenian Foreign Minister Eduard Nalbandian
told RFE/RL’s Armenian service on May 1 that he had responded to
Babacan’s letter in a similarly "positive way." "We should not work
the way we did in the past, because we failed to solve our problems
and to normalize relations. We should work with a new style," he
said without elaborating. Nalbandian found the very fact of a rare
exchange of letters between Armenian and Turkish leaders encouraging
and expressed the hope that it would be followed by "positive steps."

Turkey closed its land border with Armenia in 1993, at the height
of the Armenian-Azerbaijani war over Nagorno-Karabakh, out of
solidarity with Azerbaijan, with which it has a close ethnic and
cultural affinity. Successive Turkish governments have since made the
reopening of that border and the establishment of diplomatic relations
with Yerevan conditional on a resolution of the Nagorno-Karabakh
conflict acceptable to Azerbaijan. They have also demanded a halt
to the decades-long Armenian campaign for international recognition
of the 1915-1918 mass killings and deportations of Armenians in the
Ottoman Empire as genocide. Ankara has reacted particularly furiously
(most recently in the fall of 2007) to persistent efforts by Armenian
lobbying groups in the United States to push such a resolution
through Congress.

Armenia’s leaders, for their part, have rejected any linkage between
the Nagorno-Karabakh dispute and Turkish-Armenian ties. They have
also agitated for genocide recognition, while stressing that they
do not regard it as a precondition for improving relations with
Turkey. President Sarkisian reaffirmed this policy in a written
statement issued ahead of the April 24 annual remembrance of more than
one million Ottoman Armenians killed in what many historians consider
the first genocide of the 20th century. He made it clear that Yerevan
would continue to support the genocide recognition effort spearheaded
by the worldwide Armenian diaspora "with multiplied vigor."

Whether the proposed dialogue is a sign of a softening of the Turkish
policy on Armenia or a public relations stunt is not yet clear. The
offer seems in stark contrast to the Turkish government’s reported
refusal to allow an organization of Turkish and Armenian businessmen
lobbying for cross-border commerce between the two countries to open
an office in Istanbul. In a May 9 statement, the Turkish-Armenian
Business Development Council (TABDC) said that it had been ordered by
the Turkish Interior Ministry to "cease its activities in Turkey." The
TABDC said the ban was "sending mixed signals regarding the Turkish
government’s intentions." "The rejection letter by the Ministry of
Interior in Ankara is all the more surprising as this same government
had sought help from the TABDC a few years ago to establish contact
with Armenians in Armenia and the Diaspora," the group’s Turkish
co-chairman, Kaan Soyak, complained.

Ankara has stuck to its preconditions despite years of pressure from
Washington, which believes that the normalization of Turkish-Armenian
relations would give a huge boost to regional stability. "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," US Deputy Assistant Secretary
of State for Europe and Eurasia Matthew Bryza said in October 2007
(RFE/RL, October 24, 2007).

According to David Phillips, an American scholar who chaired a
US-sponsored "reconciliation commission" of prominent Turks and
Armenians, Ankara came within an inch of opening that border in the
summer of 2003. In a book published in 2005, Phillips said the Turks
backed off after the U.S. pressure "all but disappeared" with the
onset of the war in Iraq. With no such pressure visible at the moment
and prospects for a Nagorno-Karabakh settlement remaining uncertain,
a Turkish-Armenian rapprochement may still be a long way off.