OBAMA URGES TURKEY, ARMENIA TO NORMALIZE TIES SOON

_4/7/2009_1
Tuesday, April 7, 2009

ISTANBUL (Combined Sources)–U.S. President Barack Obama urged the
foreign ministers of Turkey and Armenia during a meeting late Monday
to complete talks aimed at restoring ties between the two neighbors.

Ankara and Yerevan are engaged in high-level negotiations to end
nearly a century of hostility, including the reopening of the border —
a move which could help shore up stability in the volatile Caucasus.

"On the margins of tonight’s Alliance of Civilizations dinner, the
president met the foreign ministers of Turkey, Armenia and Switzerland
to commend their efforts toward Turkish-Armenian normalization
and to urge them to complete an agreement with dispatch," a senior
U.S. official told reporters in Istanbul.

The official was referring to a U.N.-backed conference in Istanbul
organized to discuss ways of building bridges between the Muslim
world and the West, which Obama attended on Monday as part of his
visit to Turkey.

"President Obama voiced support for efforts by the leaders of Armenia
and Turkey to normalize bilateral relations, expressing satisfaction
with progress made in the negotiations of late," Tigran Balayan, a
spokesman for the Armenian Foreign Ministry, said, commenting on the
meeting. He said Obama "encouraged" the two sides to sign a relevant
agreement "in the near future."

"In the words of President Obama, the steps taken by the leaders of
Armenia and Turkey are historic and courageous and the opening of
the Turkish-Armenian border can earn the two peoples a peaceful and
prosperous future," Balayan told RFE/RL from Istanbul.

Speaking at a joint news conference with Turkish President Abdullah
Gul in Ankara earlier on Monday, Obama said the Turkish-Armenian
negotiations "could bear fruit very quickly, very soon." He indicated
that he will therefore be very careful in his public pronouncements on
the 1915-1918 mass killings and deportations of Armenians in Ottoman
Empire. He at the same time stood by his earlier statements describing
the deaths of more than one million Armenians as genocide.