PRESIDENT OF ARMENIA WILL NOT ACCEPT IMITATION

Panorama.am
14:03 30/07/2009

President of Armenia Serzh Sargsyan announced yesterday that he would
accept invitation to travel to Turkey only if Ankara started taking
visible steps to deblockade Armenia.

"I will only accept the invitation only if the agreements are observed
and visible steps are taken, i.e. I will go to Turkey if the border
is open or if we are on the threshold of Armenia’s deblockading,"
President said.

In fact President Serzh Sargsyan made similar statement a few months
ago in his interviews given to foreign media on the occasion of him
taking the office. In this respect, we are much interested in what
the need was to repeat the same statement. But there is such need. It
was necessary to make Ankara understand that their activities of
imitating things have been decoded by Armenia; hence Yerevan will not
allow thinking that certain steps have been made and that Armenian
side should give response. Serzh Sargsyan stressed that imitated
activities are unacceptable for him and that they can not be ground
for his visit to Turkey.

It’s worth reminding that a year ago Serzh Sargsyan took exclusive
initiative inviting his Turkish counterpart Abdulah Gul to travel to
Armenia to watch Armenia-Turkey football match. It’s obvious that the
mission of the invitation was to start the process of regulating ties;
the invitation has been accepted by Ankara under the influence of
several objective and subjective elements. Since then the initiative
has been called "football diplomacy".

In the framework of that process Yerevan and Ankara have had various
open and closed-door meetings in the aftermath of which a joint
statement was made in April on "road map" regulating the ties. Though
the content of the document is not published but it’s supposed that
Turkey should deblockade Armenian border without any preconditions
and should also set diplomatic ties with Armenia.

To suppose that if President Sargsyan defined October as the
deadline of implementing the process, then we should expect that the
processes should be implemented before that. But if we consider that
no other issue is defined by the agenda but to open the border and
set diplomatic ties, then the deadline will be defined October when
the football match will be under way.

And is it necessary to worry about Turkey to make imitation? Of course,
we do. To consider official Ankara’s statements it becomes obvious
that they have kept the formal part and have postponed the process
of making statements.