ARMENIA AND TURKEY: CHILDREN OF THE SAME EARTH
By Hugh Pope

Today’s Zaman
20 September 2008, Saturday
Turkey

The soccer was disappointing: A scrappy game on a rough pitch whipped
by turbulent winds that sent many a pass askew.

But the Armenia-Turkey World Cup qualifier in the Armenian capital
of Yerevan on Sept. 6 was an almost unbelievable event. The 2-0
victory for the Turks was beside the point. All eyes were on the two
countries’ presidents, sitting together in the stadium — albeit behind
bulletproof glass — in a brave attempt to bury one of the Caucasus’
most bitter legacies.

This was the first visit by a Turkish head of state to Armenia, and
it was all the more remarkable for taking place less than a month
after Russia’s invasion of Georgia set the Caucasus on a knife’s
edge. It’s part of a realignment in which Turkey, caught between its
NATO membership and its energy reliance on Russia, is pushing for
a regional diplomatic initiative that would bring together Russia,
Georgia, Azerbaijan, Armenia and Turkey.

Within that context, Armenians and Turks are seizing a chance to stop
their futures being mortgaged to history. That includes the dispute
about the Armenians’ demand that the Turks recognize their claims
that there was genocide in the Ottoman Empire in 1915 that killed 1.5
million Armenians, many of them women and children. Turkey, which
succeeded that empire in 1923, agrees that hundreds of thousands
died as a result of massacres, forced marches, famine and disease,
but it says that this was World War I, that many Turks were killed
by Armenians and that the Armenian militia was openly aligned with
the invading forces of the Ottomans’ enemy, the Russians.

It is not just the Armenian side that has to overcome bitterness.

Armenian attacks from 1973 to 1994 killed 42 members of the Turkish
Foreign Ministry and their families all over the world. Turkey
also closed its border with Armenia in sympathy with Azerbaijan
during the 1988-94 Nagorno-Karabakh war, in which Armenians, seeking
self-determination for that Armenian-majority enclave, seized more
than 15 percent of Azerbaijan and drove more than 700,000 Azerbaijanis
from their homes (more than 400,000 Armenians also fled or were driven
from Azerbaijan).

The two sides do not have formal diplomatic relations, but Turkish
President Abdullah Gul’s visit to Yerevan, at the invitation of
Armenian President Serzh Sarksyan, did not come out of the blue.

Turkey has in recent years pushed its idea that the genocide issue
should be turned over to a mutually agreed, neutral commission
of historians, although many Armenians in the diaspora, mainly
in California, France and Lebanon, want full recognition of the
genocide to come before normalized diplomatic relations. In April,
Armenia elected Sarksyan, who began to stress Armenia’s desire for
normalization. Formerly secret meetings between Armenian and Turkish
diplomats are now moving forward faster and with greater transparency.

Turkey has many reasons for reaching out to Armenia beyond stability
in the Caucasus. Seeking regional influence, it is working to improve
relations with all its 10 difficult neighbors, and notably with Cyprus,
where it is backing progress toward a settlement to reunite Turkish
Cypriots with the rest of the Mediterranean island. It wants to show
that it can resolve disputes, which will bolster its negotiations to
join the European Union. It also needs moral points in its struggle
with the Armenian lobby, which will next year almost certainly try
again to win US official recognition of an Armenian genocide.

Trouble in the neighborhood is also concentrating minds in Armenia,
which spun free of the Soviet Union in 1991. Its future no longer
seems secure, given its near total strategic dependence on a newly
assertive Russia, a border with a difficult Iran and the fact that
70 percent of its trade passes through unstable Georgia.

With Armenians surprised and somewhat guarded about the Turkish
turnabout, there were fewer boos and hisses for Gul in the Yerevan
soccer stadium than might have been expected, nationalist parties
muted their opposition and the several hundred protesters along his
motorcade route simply held placards demanding genocide recognition.

Participants, however, said real warmth characterized the relations
between the officials, who rediscovered how close Turkish and Armenian
cuisine, musical tastes and social culture remain.

In Turkey, meanwhile, almost all major media commentators cheered
Gul’s decision to travel to Armenia, and two-thirds of Turks told
pollsters they approved. A top retired Turkish ambassador publicly
suggested that Turkey would do well to exchange ambassadors, open
the border, apologize for the events of 1915 and offer compensation
and even citizenship for the descendants of those expelled.

A dispute that has done Turkey and the Caucasus so much harm may have
begun to abate. As Gul put it: "We are all the children of the same
earth, with memories that are both bitter and sweet."

*Hugh Pope is co-author of "Turkey Unveiled: A History of Modern
Turkey" and is Turkey project director for the International Crisis
Group.