TURKEY, ARMENIA AGREE TO ROADMAP ARTICLE
MARC CHAMPION

Wall Street Journal
46648221.html#articleTabs=article
April 22 2009

YEREVAN — Turkey and Armenia said they have agreed a "roadmap"
to restoring relations between the two historic foes, a day before
U.S. President Barack Obama was expected to make a closely watched
statement on the 1915 mass murder of Armenians in the Ottoman Empire.

The agreement, worked out in marathon talks late Wednesday night with
U.S. and Swiss mediation, sets out a "sequence of steps" the two sides
must take toward restoring diplomatic relations and reopening their
border, which Turkey closed in 1993, according to people familiar
with the matter.

The statement was "a breakthrough," these people said, mainly because
for the first time it put both sides on the record saying they had
agreed to a framework for reconciliation. Crucially, however, no time
frame has yet been agreed upon.

In an interview with the Wall Street Journal shortly before the
joint statement, President Serzh Sargsyan of Armenia set an October
deadline for Turkey to re-open the border between the two countries. He
also said new conditions Turkish leaders appeared recently to set
for a deal, namely that Armenia must first settle a 20-year-old
territorial dispute with Azerbaijan, were "not acceptable." (Read
the full transcript.)

By insisting that Armenia and Azerbaijan first settle their conflict
over Nagorno Karabakh, a mainly Armenian-populated enclave of
Azerbaijan that separated after a bloody war in the early 1990s,
Turkish leaders had in recent days set back earlier hopes in Washington
and Brussels that Europe’s only closed international border could
soon open, potentially stabilizing an important energy transit route
through the Caucasus.

But Turkish leaders are also eager to ensure Mr. Obama does not
recognize the 1915 massacre and deportation of up to 1.5 million
Armenians as "genocide," when he makes an annual statement on
Armenia’s memorial day Friday. U.S. officials declined to comment
on the statement before it was made, but analysts said Wednesday
night’s announcement should reduce pressure on Mr. Obama to use the
genocide term.

Turkey insists the enormous civilian Armenian death toll during World
War I were the result of the chaos and necessities of war, and not
of a policy to eliminate ethnic Armenians from Eastern Anatolia.

Armenian officials, meanwhile, were eager to ensure that Turkey said
on the record it has agreed a framework for reconciliation before
Mr. Obama’s statement, worrying that if he were to use the genocide
word, Turkey would simply deny its involvement in any serious talks
with Armenia and walk away.

U.S. officials have been heavily involved in encouraging the
process. Earlier this month, Mr. Obama called President Ilham Aliyev
to discuss it. This week, Vice President Joe Biden talked by phone
with Mr. Sargsyan. The State Department’s point man for the region,
Matthew Bryza, has spent five of the last six weeks on the ground in
the Caucasus, trying to break the deadlock.

The latest talks started in the wake of the war between Russia and
Georgia last September, when Turkish President Abdullah Gul visited
Yerevan for a World Cup qualifying match between the two countries’
soccer teams. Mr. Sargsyan said he wouldn’t go to Turkey for the
second leg of the match in October if the border wasn’t either open or
"on the eve" of opening by then.

"I was not supposed to travel to Turkey as a simple tourist or as
a football fan," said Mr. Sargsyan, who headed Nagorno Karabakh’s
military effort during the war. "What’s the sense in that?"

Such a move would likely end the current "soccer diplomacy" between
the two historic foes.

Turkey has come under severe pressure from Azerbaijan, which worries
that with the border reopened Armenia will have less incentive to
settle the conflict in Karabakh. Azeri leaders in recent weeks have
threatened no longer to favor Turkey as a customer and export route for
its oil and gas. Last week, Russian officials said Azerbaijan’s state
oil company, SOCAR, had agreed to set terms in May for Azerbaijan to
sell natural gas to Russia.

A day after Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey drew the
link to a settlement in Karabakh last week, Mr. Sargsyan went to
Tehran to initial an agreement for construction of a new $1.2 billion,
290-mile railway to connect Armenia with Iran’s Persian Gulf. Should
the Turkish rail link remain closed, that would give Armenia its
alternative freight route to the rail connection through Georgia.

Akhurik, near Armenia’s second city, Gyumri would be the main border
crossing from Armenia to Turkey should the border reopen. The road
leading to the border crossing is mud-surfaced, with potholes 20
feet in diameter. The long barrels of artillery and fixed tanks still
point at Turkey out of concrete bunkers.

During the Soviet era, 30 freight trains a day used to cross the border
at Akhurik, bringing bulk goods to and from Turkey, including meat
for a meat-processing plant. Trains from Azerbaijan and Russia brought
cotton from Central Asia, to supply Gyumri’s textile plants. By 1993,
all three routes were blocked and the factories — still recovering
from a 1988 earthquake that killed 25,000 people in the city — closed
for good, laying off thousands. Seventy percent of all Armenian exports
and imports now come via a single route from Georgia’s Black Sea ports.

Arsen Ghazarian, who runs a $40 million a year trucking and freight
forwarding business says he has already bought 7.5 acres of land in
Akhurik for a train container terminal as "an investment."

"We have a very small domestic market. If the border opened we could
also sell to Eastern Turkey," said Samvel Balasanyan, who founded
a local brewer, Gyumri Beer. "My grandfather lost five of his seven
brothers in the genocide, but we need to talk to and trade with our
neighbors," he said.

Diplomats and Armenian officials and businessmen haven’t given up,
noting that Turkey needs to open the border if it wants to join
the European Union. Though talks on a Karabakh settlement have been
deadlocked for years. Mr. Sargsyan said he has seen promising signals
in recent days from Azerbaijan.

"Now is the time for a very serious exchange of possible developments
and ways to advance to a resolution," said Mr. Sargsyan. He said he
had agreed with international mediators to hold talks with Mr. Aliyev
when they meet at an E.U. event in Prague early next month.