Le Monde diplomatique
27 August 2009
Blog Posts
Exclusive: The View from Armenia
By Vicken Cheterian
Mount Ararat towers above Armenia’s capital, Yerevan. Just 50 km to
the south of the city, you see the mountain soaring 4 km high (on a
fine day) and glimpse its beauty, glaciers that seem to hang from the
sky. But you can’t hike or climb it, for the border with Turkey
remains closed, and there are military installations, patrols and
barbed wire. It is the last closed border of the cold war.
What is hampering the normalisation of relations between Ankara and
Yerevan is a dispute over Karabakh and Turkey’s support for
Azerbaijan, not the widely discussed topic of genocide. Ankara wants
Armenia to withdraw its troops from Karabakh and other
Azerbaijani-occupied territories before it opens the border and
establishes diplomatic relations with Armenia.
But in the last two years, diplomatic activities have increased. Since
2007, Armenian and Turkish diplomats have been meeting secretly in
Switzerland. Sources say they have studied in detail all the remaining
sticking points between the two countries.
There has also been a year of football diplomacy. The Armenian
president Serge Sarkissian invited his Turkish counterpart, Abdullah
Gul, to attend a World Cup match between the two national teams in
Yerevan in September 2008. Gul came ` and left his foreign minister,
Ali Babacan, behind for further negotiations. Hopes were high that
after a century of hostilities there would be some positive move.
There were further expectations this 24 April (the date on which
Armenians commemorate the 1915 genocide). American Armenians were
hopeful that, once in power, Barack Obama would respect his campaign
pledges and recognise the Armenian genocide. Instead, on 22 April, the
Turkish foreign ministry announced that it had reached agreement with
Armenia on a `road map’ to normalise relations (confirmed by the Swiss
and Armenian foreign ministries). No details were forthcoming. The
word `road map’ seem
of the failed road maps for Israeli-Palestinian negotiations. Then
Obama, in his 24 April speech to the Armenians, used the expression
`medz yeghern’, meaning `great calamity’, and not the word which
Armenian militants have been struggling for decades to hear, and which
has juridical power: genocide.
Since April little has happened. Ankara has repeated that there can be
no opening of borders before the Karabakh conflict is settled. Sources
have spoken of divergent views within the Turkish AKP, including
between Gul and his prime minister Recep Erdogan.. Others speak of
pressures on Gul from nationalist circles or from Azerbaijan. The lack
of progress has also increased pressure on the Armenian president for
handing Turkey too many concessions: the Tashnak Party has quit the
governing coalition and is demanding the resignation of foreign
minister Edward Nalbandian.
On 14 October, it is the turn of the Armenian football team to play in
Turkey. Sarkissian is invited, but may not go unless the border opens,
according to renewed speculation in Armenia. Whatever the outcome,
football diplomacy has sparked new interest in the region. In recent
years, Armenian and Turkish intellectuals and human rights activists
have had continuous exchanges and discussed a wealth of projects. The
fence dividing the two peoples has fallen and the attempt to define a
new relationship has started.
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