The Times
September 2, 2009
Bronwen Maddox, Chief Foreign Commentator
Turkey and Armenia sidestep 94-year-old massacre for tentative peace

It’s taken only 94 years to make peace. It might have taken much longer.
The talks between Turkey and Armenia about whether they can manage something
like normal relations are probably more symbol than substance. But they
represent a gesture that might easily not have been made, particularly by
Turkey. They are an unexpected step towards calm from the tense borderlands
between Europe and Central Asia.

They will have an effect in the US, too, where the clash between Armenia and
Turkey has played to a nationwide, passionate audience, from Congress to the
singer Cher (who is Armenian). In Europe it might seem like a far-off
dispute; in the US it is intimate, eating up congressional debates and
national airtime.

Even in the European Union it will have an impact greater than this week’s
tentative moves suggest. It will ease Turkey’s relations with the EU after
several years of friction.

Yet the steps, so far, are small. On Monday the two said that they would
sign a pact within weeks to talk about resuming ties, although that hurdle
would need approval by both parliaments. If they get that far, it would end
nearly a century of animosity that stems from the killing of as many as 1.5
million Armenians under the Ottoman Empire in 1915, during the First World
War. Armenia calls it genocide and wants an admission and an apology. Turkey
maintains that many were killed on each side. There have not been diplomatic
ties, other than when Armenia was part of the Soviet Union. The border was
closed during the 1988-94 conflict over the Azerbaijani region of
Nagorno-Karabakh.

Now the border might open, possibly by the new year, officials on each side
suggest, although the greater impetus for a deal clearly comes from Armenia.
It is landlocked, and has an urgent need for trade. As its President, Serzh
Sargsyan, said yesterday: `Armenia initiated the possibility of normalising
relations’ – adding, grandly but justifiably, that he had done so `with
dignity as it is appropriate to the civilised world of the 21st century’.

The agreement, brokered by Swiss officials and taking shape since April,
baldly leaves aside history, genocide or the frozen Nagorno-Karabakh dispute
(although Turkey insists progress on this front needs to happen in
parallel). This is what you might call constructive evasion. We should hope
that they manage at least to open the border. Allowing everyday contact
would be an antidote to the understandable difficulty in forgetting who
slaughtered whom a century ago.

It would also take the sting out of the repeated eruptions in American
politics over the issue, powered by the US’s large Armenian community. Two
years ago, President Bush clashed with a Democrat-led House of
Representatives committee that denounced the 1915 deaths as genocide, even
though a phalanx of former secretaries of state warned about the impact on
relations with Turkey, a crucial ally. If Armenia and Turkey can be talked
down from the embrace of this old conflict, it is even possible that the US
Congress eventually can, too.