INTERVIEW-TURKEY TALKS ON ARMENIA "PAUSED" – EU MEDIATOR
By Michael Stott

Reuters
June 17 2009
UK

MOSCOW, June 17 (Reuters) – Turkey has taken a "tactical step
backwards" on normalising relations with Armenia because of hostile
domestic reaction to the move, the EU’s envoy to the region said in
an interview.

"A step back was taken by the Turkish side … but this is not a
U-turn," said EU South Caucasus envoy Peter Semneby. "We expect the
conversations will continue."

After decades of hostility, Muslim Turkey and Christian Armenia
announced in April a "roadmap" for re-establishing diplomatic relations
and opening their shared border.

But Ankara’s Muslim ally Azerbaijan said Armenia should first leave
Nagorno-Karabakh, a mostly ethnic Armenian enclave which broke away
after fighting a bloody war with Azerbaijan in the 1990s and claims
independence.

Turkey then offered support for the Azeri position, complicating
further progress in talks with Armenia.

Semneby said in the interview, conducted at the end of a visit to
Moscow last week, that it was important the "pause" in the peace
process between Turkey and Armenia did not last too long because of
the risk that impetus would be lost.

"The normalisation (with Armenia) became the subject of quite
widespread and heated discussion in Turkey," he added in earlier
remarks to a small group of reporters. "It seems to me, this discussion
became more heated than was expected." Turkish Prime Minister Tayyip
Erdogan promised Azerbaijan during a visit to Baku last month that
Ankara would not open its border with Armenia — closed since 1993 —
until Armenia ended what he termed its occupation of Nagorno-Karabakh.

"I see this as a Turkish tactical step backwards," Semneby told
Reuters. "But fundamentally, the new foreign policy that has been
pursued by the Erdogan government, I don’t see that this policy
is changing."

PROGRESS

Talks on the future of Nagorno-Karabakh have been dragging on for more
than a decade under the auspices of the Minsk Group linking Russia,
France and the United States.

But Armenia, whose president, Serzh Sarksyan, is from Nagorno-Karabakh,
is reluctant to budge and Azerbaijan periodically threatens military
intervention.

Nonetheless Semneby believes real progress is being made.

"It is clear that if you look at the negotiating process, it is
intensifying," he told Reuters. "We had in a month two meetings and
there will be another relatively soon between the presidents."

The Nagorno-Karabakh war, in which up to 30,000 died, was the bloodiest
of a spate of conflicts which followed the 1991 collapse of the Soviet
Union. Armed clashes still occur regularly along the lines separating
Azeri and Armenian troops.

Asked about the risk of conflict, Semneby said it would be foolish
to neglect it but he felt both sides understood the enormous costs
which would be involved in any large-scale military engagement.

"Even with this very dangerous posturing that we see sometimes and the
fact that the forces are not separated and there are incidents all the
time, the two sides are by now used to managing incidents," he said.

"If anything, the Georgia war (last year with Russia), demonstrated
the risks of military engagement … it was also a wake-up call to
both countries how vulnerable they are." (Editing by Alison Williams)