NO EASY COURTSHIP
by Timothy Spence

Transitions Online
30 September 2008
Czech Republic

There are positive signs in the budding relationship between Armenia
and Turkey. But don’t expect too much too soon.

When representatives of the NATO Euro-Atlantic Partnership Council
gather this week in Armenia’s capital to discuss energy security, much
of the focus is likely to be on the country’s own highly combustible
neighborhood.

Russia’s rapid defeat of Georgia, its assertiveness in securing
energy deals with its old Soviet allies, and Armenia’s unresolved
territorial dispute with petroleum-rich Azerbaijan have triggered
growing skepticism about the South Caucasus being the preferred
transit corridor in Europe’s quest for Caspian Sea oil and gas. The
region looks more and more like a potholed country road rather than
a bypass around Russia.

But the 50-nation seminar scheduled in Yerevan on 2-3 October will
also take place amid promising political developments between Armenia
and Turkey. In a flurry of activity in recent weeks, the longtime
adversaries have taken steps to patch up relations and possibly open
their borders to trade after years of isolation and bitterness.

A reduction in tensions would improve chances for advancing peace talks
between Armenia and Turkey’s ally Azerbaijan. "It could change the
game in that region," said Shamil Yenikeyeff, an analyst at Britain’s
Oxford Energy Institute who was among those invited to the Yerevan
energy security meeting.

A seminal moment for Armenia and Turkey came this summer when Armenian
President Serzh Sargsyan invited his Turkish counterpart to Yerevan
for the 6 September match between the nations’ football teams – an
invitation criticized by some of Sargsyan’s allies, including his
predecessor, Robert Kocharian. Turkey’s Abdullah Gul accepted. The
meetings of the two teams and the two leaders were unprecedented.

Bridging a divide? Presidents Sargsyan and Gul shake hands during
their meeting in early September.

‘THE TIME HAS COME’

The weeks since have seen discussions of energy and trade cooperation,
re-opening transit corridors, and even an end to Turkey’s embargo of
Armenia, unthinkable only a few months ago.

Sargsyan told the UN General Assembly on 25 September that the two
leaders discussed an array of issues. "The most important was our
decision not to leave the current problems to the future generations. I
am confident that the time has come to solve Armenian-Turkish problems,
and on that issue I observed similar determination on behalf of
President Gul."

Last weekend, foreign ministers of Turkey, Azerbaijan, and Armenia met
on the sidelines of the UN General Assembly session, and leaders of
all three countries have acknowledged that the Georgia crisis makes
resolving their own differences all the more urgent.

In recent days, Gul told Turkish newspapers that the country should
not rule out lifting the embargo it imposed on Armenia in 1993 for its
support of ethnic-Armenian separatists in Azerbaijan’s Nagorno-Karabakh
region. The embargo has forced Armenia to rely heavily on Russia
for trade and energy supplies, much of it shipped through Georgia,
and Armenia has increasingly turned to Iran for energy and trade deals.

Armenia and its giant neighbor may be talking, but major differences
remain and hardliners in both countries have criticized any
normalization of relations until their demands are met.

A first step to normalization would require Turkey to acknowledge
the slaughter and starvation of more than 1 million Armenians
that occurred in the final years of the Ottoman Empire. Turkey’s
long-standing position has been that the modern republic cannot be
held responsible for the actions of its crumbling predecessor. And it
has been less than diplomatic with countries that have urged Ankara
to fess up to the atrocities committed by the Ottomans.

A year ago, Ankara recalled its ambassador to the United States over
a congressional resolution labeling as genocide the mass killings of
Armenians by the Ottomans. Turkey took similar actions in 2006 with
Canada and France.

For their part, the Turks have insisted that Armenia end its
occupation of parts of Azerbaijan and restore Nagorno-Karabakh to Azeri
sovereignty. Turkey’s Azeri allies have also sought the repatriation
of nearly 1 million people who were displaced from Karabakh and nearby
areas by fighting that erupted when it was still an autonomous region
within Soviet Azerbaijan.

An uncomfortable status quo has existed for more than a decade, with
Armenia boxed in on two sides, Karabakh declaring itself an independent
republic supported only by Armenia, and Azerbaijan demanding a return
of its territory.

WARTIME URGENCY

It was the urgency of the Georgian crisis that may have accelerated
the developments in relations between Armenia and Turkey. Turkey,
which has championed closer cooperation among Black Sea states,
including Russia, led a flurry of diplomatic activity in the Caucasus
after the August war in Georgia and called for a Caucasus Stability
and Cooperation Platform involving Armenia, Azerbaijan, Georgia,
and Russia. "All parties concerned seem receptive to the idea, and
we hope they will give it a chance to work," Gul told the UN General
Assembly on 23 September.

Armenia, meanwhile, depends heavily on Russian imports that come
through Georgia and feared that it would be cut off from its main
supply routes. After the hostilities began in South Ossetia, Yerevan
appealed to the Kremlin not to halt natural gas exports through a
Gazprom pipeline that supplies both Georgia and Armenia. Yerevan also
urged Moscow not to blockade transit routes and the Black Sea ports
that Armenia uses for trade.

Even before the conflict and the football match, however, there
were telltale signs of a thaw. After being elected in February,
amid increasingly violent protests from Armenian opposition parties,
Sargsyan received a congratulatory letter from an unusual address –
the Turkish president’s office. Gul’s letter expressed hope that
"an atmosphere based on reciprocal trust and cooperation can be
established that will contribute to regional peace and prosperity."

Business groups on both sides have sought to ease the embargo and open
the door to trade across a border that is still guarded by Russian
troops, at Armenia’s invitation. An end to the blockade, a settlement
of the conflict with Azerbaijan, and the demilitarization of Armenia’s
east and west borders could be a boon to all three countries.

A European Parliament report in 2007 noted that re-establishing
rail and other transport connections would give Turkey an important
direct route to markets in Azerbaijan and Central Asia. Armenia would
immediately gain from trade that now filters through Georgia. A
re-opening of borders, the report said, would also help bring
opportunity and stability to eastern Anatolia, where the Kurdish
separatist movement PKK makes its home.

Some energy analysts also see benefits in reopening these borders if
Georgia’s future remains uncertain. Rebuilding neglected, Soviet-era
rail links would offer alternative routes for petroleum products that
must now pass through Georgia. An attack on a railway bridge west of
Tbilisi in mid-August left Azerbaijan’s state-run oil company unable
to send the 140,000 barrels of oil it ships daily to Black Sea ports
overland through Georgia.

Still, these prospects remain distant. Both Azerbaijan and Turkey
have insisted that Armenia respect the territorial integrity of
Azerbaijan and a UN resolution to that effect. Armenia’s backing for
Nagorno-Karabakh – like Russia’s recognition of Georgia’s breakaway
South Ossetia and Abkhazia – has little international support but is
an important rallying cry for stubborn nationalists.

"I don’t see that moving toward any conclusion anytime soon," Julia
Nanay, head of the Russia and Caspian service at the advisory firm
PFC Energy in Washington, said of the frozen conflict between Armenia
and Azerbaijan.

ARMS RACE

Armenia and Azerbaijan also have been locked in an arms race that
conflict monitors like the Brussels-based International Crisis Group
fear is a precursor to renewed fighting after more than a decade
of brittle peace. Drawing on the windfall from export revenues that
reached $21.3 billion in 2007, much of it from oil and gas shipments,
Azerbaijan’s president, Ilham Aliev, has boosted military spending
from $150 million when he took office in 2003 to more than $1.3
billion this year. In the run-up to the presidential election on
15 October, Aliev has called for a further 50 percent increase in
military spending. Armenian leaders have responded with double-digit
rate increases, but the poorer and smaller nation’s defense budget
is less than one-third its neighbor’s.

In his UN address last month, Sargsyan – without naming Azerbaijan
directly – accused the country of violating the 13-year-old Karabakh
cease-fire. "If any country increases its military budget and brags
about it, if limitation on weapons stipulated by the international
agreements are being violated and done so openly, if a country
signed a cease-fire agreement, which constitutes an international
responsibility, but on any occasion threatens to resume military
actions, it must receive a rapid and firm response."

Better relations with Turkey and more direct Turkish involvement in
settling the conflict could help. But some analysts doubt that much
is going to happen anytime soon. Russia’s recognition of Abkhazia
and South Ossetia could embolden both sides – Armenia’s defense of
ethnic kin in Nagorno-Karabakh, and the Azerbaijan-Turkish position
that the borders of sovereign states should be protected – and only
prolong the stalemate.

And then there’s Russia, the newly assertive force in the
region. Despite the Kremlin’s commitment to resolving the Karabakh
issue through a negotiated settlement, Svante Cornell, research
director at the Central Asia-Caucasus Institute in Stockholm, said
the Kremlin would look askance at any serious rapprochement between
Yerevan and its neighbors because it would end Russia’s domination
of Armenia. "I don’t see this going anywhere," he said.