WHITHER TURKISH-ARMENIAN RELATIONS?
Nicholas Birch in Istanbul

business new europe (subscpription)
248
Sept 16 2008
Germany

As symbolic gestures go, Turkish President Abdullah Gul’s attendance
at an Armenia-Turkey football match in Yerevan on September 6 could
not have been bettered.

The first visit by a senior Turkish politician since Armenia became
independent 17 years ago, it has sparked an upsurge of fraternal
feeling on both sides of a border closed since 1993. And the signs are
that there is more to come. If Armenia agrees to renounce territorial
claims on eastern Turkey implicit in its founding charter, one senior
Turkish diplomat says: "We could see diplomatic relations begun and
rail links restarted within six months."

"The two sides are in agreement over a surprising number of issues,"
agrees Richard Giragosian, a Yerevan-based analyst, describing
Armenia’s invitation of Gul as "a vital foreign policy victory"
for the Caucasian state’s embattled government. Armenia stands to
benefit enormously from the rapprochement. With its Azeri and Turkish
borders closed, Georgia has been its only window on the West. When
Russia wrecked Georgian infrastructure in August, it was Armenians,
not Georgians, who suffered from food shortages.

It is no coincidence either that the two Turkish provinces bordering
Armenia are the country’s poorest. For years, politicians in Kars and
Igdir have been calling for the border to be opened. Trade between
the two countries "would slow rapid population movement away from
eastern Turkey," says former Turkish ambassador to Russia, Volkan
Vural. "It would provide Central Asia-bound exporters with a good
new route. Plus energy security would be improved if Armenia joins
current energy projects."

Though Turkey has increasingly used its key position on the "East-West"
corridor connecting Europe to the Caspian as a card in its stumbling
EU negotiations, such optimism seems premature, for three reasons.

Reasons not to be cheerful

First, it ignores the fact that Armenia’s border with Azerbaijan
has been closed since the 1988-1994 armed conflict that took place
in the small ethnic enclave of Nagorno-Karabakh in southwestern
Azerbaijan, between the predominantly ethnic Armenians and Azeri
forces. Azerbaijan showed considerable statesmanship in backing the
Turkish-Armenian rapprochement. But there is no sign of progress on
Nagorno-Karabakh. Instead, enriched with oil and gas money, Baku now
spends $1bn annually on military rearmament. Belligerent rhetoric
about re-taking lost territories is, if anything, on the up.

Second, and much more importantly, Turkey’s talk of a new Caucasian
pact appears to ignore the key lesson of August’s conflict in South
Ossetia; in today’s Caucasus, Russia is boss. The August bust-up "was
clearly not about Ossetia, only a little about Georgia, only a little
about Nato, and a huge amount about geopolitics," says David Smith,
director of the Georgian Security Analysis Center in Tbilisi. "It was
a shot fired at the East-West corridor, a warning to BP, ExxonMobil,
anybody hoping to loosen Gazprom’s hold on Central Asia."

With Russian bombs falling within 200 metres of the Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan
(BTC) oil pipeline, Georgia’s neighbours seem to have got the
message. Azerbaijan recently upped oil exports via Russian pipelines
when BTC flow was interrupted by a Turkish Kurdish separatist sabotage
attack on the pipeline on August 6. And when US Vice-President Dick
Cheney visited Baku on September 3 to drum up local support for a
trans-Caspian gas line, Azeri President Ilham Aliyev turned him down.

With the future of Nabucco, a hugely expensive EU-backed gas pipeline
due to bring Caspian gas direct to Europe by 2013, looking increasingly
doubtful, some analysts hint at the possibility of rerouting the
East-West corridor through Armenia. But this talk of Armenia offering
new energy security possibilities misses another point: Georgia
earned its position on the East-West corridor thanks to its staunch
pro-American stance; Armenia, meanwhile, to cite Richard Giragosian,
is little better than "a Russian garrison state."

Visitors to Yerevan have their passports stamped by Russian border
guards. Armenia’s energy and telecommunication sectors have been in
Russian hands since 2005 and 2006 respectively. Russian Railways bought
Armenian railways this January. In that context, Giragosian argues,
opening the Turkish-Armenian border risks abetting Russian efforts
to sideline Georgia. "The key question Turkey needs to ask itself
over Armenia," he says, "is do we have a partner on the other side."