TURKEY BLUNTS OBAMA’S DIPLOMACY

The National
April 14 2009
UAE

Less than a week after Barack Obama’s historic visit, Turkey has
denied plans to open its border with neighbouring Armenia any time
soon, thereby dropping one of the president’s key requests.

Reacting to pressure from ally Azerbaijan and the opposition at home,
Recep Tayyip Erdogan, the prime minister, indicated at the weekend
that the border will not be opened in the foreseeable future.

"We will not sign a final agreement with Armenia as long as there is
no agreement between Azerbaijan and Armenia concerning the Nagorno
Karabakh issue," Mr Erdogan told reporters, referring to a quarrel over
an Armenian enclave in Azerbaijan that led to a war in the early 1990s.

He said his government was only conducting "preparation work" that
depended on progress between Armenia and Azerbaijan.

Yasar Yakis, a former Turkish foreign minister and member of Mr
Erdogan’s Justice and Development Party, or AKP, said the opening
of the border with Armenia was part of a "big package" that also
contained a solution to the Nagorno Karabakh question.

In an address to the Turkish parliament in Ankara, Mr Obama said last
week that both Turkey and Armenia would benefit if the border was
open. "An open border would return the Turkish and Armenian people
to a peaceful and prosperous coexistence that would serve both of
your nations," the president said.

But by binding the border issue to a resolution of the long-running
conflict surrounding Nagorno Karabakh, Ankara has in effect abandoned
any effort for a speedy reconciliation with Armenia.

In the absence of any concrete steps in that direction, Turkey also
risks new tensions with Washington and an official recognition of
the Ottoman genocide against the Armenians in 1915 by Mr Obama’s
administration, something that Ankara wants to avoid at all cost.

Turkey rejects the term genocide for what happened to the Armenians
during the First World War.

Up to 1.5 million people died in death marches and massacres during
that time.

While Armenia and most scholars say the violence was part of a plan
by the Ottoman government to annihilate the Armenian population in
Anatolia, Turkey maintains the deaths were the consequences of a
resettlement plan under wartime conditions.

A recognition as genocide by the United States would be a big blow to
Ankara’s efforts to keep governments around the world from officially
adopting that term in reference to the events of 1915.

Mr Obama is to issue a statement on the plight of the Armenians on
the anniversary of the start of the massacres on April 24.

During his visit to Ankara last week, Mr Obama said his views had not
changed since he called the massacres a genocide during his election
campaign, but that he wanted to encourage the process of rapprochement
between Turkey and Armenia that started last year.

The president also hinted that major developments were in the
offing. "I want to be as constructive as possible in moving these
issues forward quickly," Mr Obama said.

"And my sense is that they are moving quickly."

One week on, things do not look that way any more.

"Normalisation with Armenia is left for some other time," Semih Idiz,
a foreign policy columnist, wrote in yesterday’s Milliyet newspaper.

Azerbaijan’s president, Ilham Aliev, demonstrated his displeasure
about a possible Turkish-Armenian reconciliation last week by staying
away from an Istanbul meeting of the Alliance of Civilisations,
a UN-sponsored initiative headed by Turkey and Spain and aimed at
strengthening dialogue between the West and the Islamic world.

As a close traditional ally of Turkey, Azerbaijan had been expected
to send its president to take part in the meeting.

Turkey closed its border with Armenia in 1993 in protest against the
Armenian occupation of parts of Azerbaijan’s territory during the
war between those two states over Nagorno Karabakh.

A ceasefire has been in place in Nagorno Karabakh since 1994, but
the conflict itself has not been resolved.

Azeri officials said the close relationship between Turkey and
Azerbaijan, which are routinely described as "one nation in two states"
by Turkish politicians, could suffer. "If the border [with Armenia]
is opened, Azerbaijan may look again at its relations with Turkey,"
Hasan Zeynalov, the Azeri consul general in the eastern Turkish city
of Kars, told Turkish newspapers.

Other officials from Azerbaijan indicated that there may be negative
consequences for Turkey in the energy sector. In recent years,
Turkey has become an important transit country for oil and gas from
Azerbaijan to world markets.

In Ankara, the Turkish opposition lost no time in criticising
the government’s overtures to Armenia. An opening of the border
would be tantamount to a recognition of "the Armenian occupation in
Azerbaijan", Deniz Baykal, leader of the Republican People’s Party,
or CHP, Turkey’s main secularist opposition party, told reporters.

Mr Erdogan’s government is also dragging its feet on another issue
raised by Mr Obama during his visit to Turkey last week.

In his speech to parliament, the president also said the reopening
of a school for Greek-Orthodox priests on an island near Istanbul
would be an "important signal" for democratic reform.

The fate of the school, which has been closed since 1971, also came
up during a meeting of the president with the Greek-Orthodox patriarch
Bartholomew I in Istanbul.

But just days after Mr Obama’s visit, Turkish newspapers quoted Mr
Erdogan as saying there were no plans to reopen the school.

The state minister in charge of religious affairs, Said Yazicioglu,
said the fact that the US president had called for the reopening of
the school "does not change anything".