TIPTOEING THE TURKISH TIGHTROPE: SARGSYAN SEES MIXED REACTION AT HOME AFTER MOSCOW STATEMENTS
Aris Ghazinyan

ArmeniaNow.com
Armenia
01 July, 2008

President Serzh Sargsyan’s statements on Armenia’s relations with
Turkey made while on a recent official visit to Russia elicited a
negative reaction from the opposition and at least one pro-government
party at home.

Meeting representatives of the Armenian Diaspora in Moscow early last
week, Sargsyan, in particular, unveiled his plans to invite Turkish
President Abdullah Gul to Yerevan in September to watch together an
upcoming World Cup qualifier between the two countries’ national teams.

The move was received enthusiastically by U.S. Deputy Assistant
Secretary of State for European and Eurasian Affairs Matthew Bryza,
who is the American co-chair of the Minsk Group of the Organization
for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE), an international format
seeking a negotiated peace in Nagorno-Karabakh. The proposal was also
positively assessed by Bryza’s wife, Zeyno Baran, a Turkish-American
scholar who currently heads the Center for Eurasian Policy at the
Hudson Institute.

The top-selling Turkish daily Hurriyet wrote about "a positive raction
in Ankara" but reported that no official invitiation had been received
in Turkey yet.

However, it is Sargsyan’s statement in which he in principle accepted
Turkey’s proposal on forming a panel of historians to review the
events of early last century that raised most disgruntled voices.

"We are not against the establishment of such a commission, but only
when the border between our states is opened," Sargsyan said.

The Turkish government’s proposal in 2005 to form a joint commisison
of historians to review the correspondence of the early 20th century
events in Ottoman Turkey to the notion "genocide" was rejected as
unacceptable by Armenia’s then president Robert Kocharyan.

And now Armenia’s main opposition groups accuse the head of state
of questioning the very fact of genocide by accepting the Turkish
proposal in principle.

The Armenian Revolutionary Federation (ARF), a coalition partner with
Sargsyan’s Republican Party, also expressed its position on Sargsyan’s
statements, reiterating its hard line on relations with Turkey.

"I think that if the president of Turkey visits Yerevan, at least one
part of our society will express its attitude," ARF Bureau spokesman
Giro Manoyan said in an interview with RFE/RL Monday.

Manoyan also said that they had received "the necessary explanation
and clarification" from the president regarding his statement on the
possibility of establishing an Armenian-Turkish commission.

"But in any case, our approach is that there was no need to make such
statements and create this confusion in the first place," Manoyan said.

Earlier, Foreign Minister Edward Nalbandyan said that Sargsyan’s
statement "does not mean that Armenia renounces former president
Robert Kocharyan’s step on including the Genocide issue on the foreign
policy agenda."

And Sargsyan’s press secretary Samvel Farmanyan argued that the
president’s words were clear and left no room for misunderstanding:
"There was a proposal from Turkey to set up an expert commission to
study historical facts concerning the genocide. We are not against
any studies, even studies of patently obvious and widely recognized
realities. However, the formation of such a commission would be logical
only after establishing diplomatic relations and opening borders."