ARMENIA TO LAUNCH TALKS ON TURKEY DEAL AMID PROTESTS

Agence France Presse
September 15, 2009 Tuesday 6:34 PM GMT

Armenia said Tuesday it will launch political talks this week
on establishing ties with Turkey after decades of hostility, as
nationalist protesters began a hunger strike against reconciliation
efforts.

President Serzh Sarkisian will meet with leaders of Armenia’s political
parties on Thursday, his spokesman Samvel Farmanian told AFP, as part
of internal consultations agreed under a deal with Turkey.

"These consultations will be one of the important steps in the public
discussion on normalising Armenian-Turkish relations. As the president
has promised, these questions, which are of national importance,
are becoming the subject of a wide public discussion," he said.

Armenia and Turkey announced last month that they had agreed a
framework to establish diplomatic ties and re-open their border,
in what was internationally hailed as a major breakthrough.

The two countries said they would hold internal political consultations
for six weeks before submitting to their parliaments two protocols
on establishing diplomatic ties and developing bilateral relations.

About 50 protesters from the nationalist Armenian Revolutionary
Federation (Dashnaktsutyun) launched a sit-in and hunger strike
against the protocols outside the foreign ministry on Tuesday.

Chanting "No Concessions to the Turks!", protesters said they would
remain outside the ministry throughout the six weeks of consultations.

"These protocols must not be signed in their current form, changes
must be made," one of the party’s leaders, Gegam Manukian, told AFP.

Protesters said they were especially concerned that the deal calls
for the creation of an intergovernmental commission to examine the
two countries’ historical grievances.

Critics say the creation of such a commission calls into question
Armenians’ claims to have been victims of genocide under Ottoman Turks.

Ankara has long refused to establish diplomatic links with Yerevan
over the latter’s efforts to have World War I-era massacres of
Armenians by Ottoman Turks recognised as genocide — a label Turkey
strongly rejects.

Armenians say up to 1.5 million of their kin were systematically killed
between 1915 and 1917 as the Ottoman Empire, Turkey’s predecessor,
was falling apart.

Turkey also closed its border with Armenia in 1993 in solidarity with
ally Azerbaijan over Yerevan’s backing of ethnic Armenian separatists
in the breakaway Nagorny Karabakh region.