Armenia and Turkey: children of the same Earth
By Hugh Pope

21 sept 08
Cyprus Mail

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 Yerevan, Armenia’s capital, on September 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 recognise there was a
genocide in the Ottoman Empire in 1915 that killed 1.5 million
Armenians, many of them women and children.

Turkey, which succeeded to 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 per cent of Azerbaijan and drove more than 700,000 Azeris 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 Sargsyan, 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 normalised diplomatic relations. In April, Armenia
elected Sargsyan, who began to stress Armenia’s desire for
normalisation. 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 neighbours, 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 neighbourhood 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 per cent 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 said real warmth characterised the relations between the
officials, however, 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 author of Turkey Unveiled: a History of Modern Turkey and
is Turkey project director for International Crisis Group