TURKEY BETWEEN ETHICS AND POLITICS: PUT IT ALL ON THE TABLE
By Raffi Hovannisian

Online Journal Guest Writer
Dec 16, 2009, 00:23

YEREVAN, Armenia — In Washington, Brussels, Moscow and elsewhere,
Turkish President Abdullah Gul, Prime Minister Erdogan, Foreign
Minister Davutoglu and others have long advocated combining into
one political agenda their country’s normalization of relations with
Armenia and the resolution of Mountainous Karabagh’s conflict with
Azerbaijan.

I agree.

Newly independent Armenia’s ostensibly mature policy — which
I supported as the nation’s first foreign affairs minister — of
seeking establishment of diplomatic relations without the positing
of any preconditions can today, 18 years into the game, be pronounced
dead on arrival.

Oddly but expectedly, it has been the senior government at
Ankara which, instead of finally recognizing the responsibility
of its Ottoman-Young Turk predecessors for the great genocide
and national dispossession of 1915 or at minimum employing the
facility of an unconditional official relationship to address and
solve the outstanding issues that resulted from it, has from the
beginning proffered a variety of unilateral conditions. The staple
prerequisites of a) removing genocide and its affirmation from
Armenia’s international vocabulary and b) validating the de facto
Turkish-Armenian frontier which had been imposed by Bolshevik-Kemalist
fiat in 1921, have since been supplemented by c) a Baku-centric
regulation of Armenian-Azerbaijani relations and of Mountainous
Karabagh’s legitimate quest for liberty, post-Stalinist decolonization
and sovereign statehood.

The bilateral power asymmetry of the past has been conjoined with a
contemporary asymmetry in diplomatic demeanor, which is underscored
by Turkey’s continued bad-neighborly blockade. This makes it finally
impossible to bridge the Turkish-Armenian divide by old and outdated
technologies.

Turkey is right on this score. And so, for the first time in all
history, bring it all out and onto the table and let’s hammer out a
comprehensive blueprint that delivers us to a brave new future of
peace, prosperity and shared security for the parties and for the
broader region.

This daring paradigm, which will entail the constructive support
of the world of nations, must provide solution and closure to a few
pivotal points on the agenda:

In order to realize its ambition of becoming an area leader of
democratic repute, Turkey must face the cardinal sin in its memory
closet, surmount decades of denial and, in the prime but sadly
unique example of postwar Germany, chart its own revolutionary path
to recognition and remorse, redemption and restitution. These can
materialize by repealing racist laws; paying honest tribute and
bringing truth to education; conducting a complete inventory of,
and then restoring, the vast cultural heritage in present-day eastern
Turkey and celebrating its Armenian identity; launching and carrying
through a homecoming initiative to guarantee the right of voluntary
return to the Armenian heartland for the progeny of genocide survivors
and the dispossessed.

It is imperative to determine and delimit the boundaries between
the Republics of Turkey and Armenia: Are they the de jure borders
as defined and awarded under Woodrow Wilson’s presidential seal in
November 1920, or the ones that obtained de facto as part of the
Russo-Turkish compact of 1921 which usurped the lion’s share of the
ancestral Armenian patrimony? What is the legal status of the historic
homelands currently under Turkish occupation, and does Armenia have a
right to sovereign access to the sea? To these ends, and absent the
parties’ diplomatic good faith in answering these questions, likely
telling of their positions and preoccupations would be their acceptance
of the compulsory jurisdiction of the International Court of Justice.

The same goes for Mountainous Karabagh and Armenian-Azerbaijani
relations. We live in a world in which the rule of interests often
trumps the rule of law, where most Western nations have overcome
standard fixations on the principle of territorial integrity to
recognize Kosovo, just as the Russian Federation and a couple of
others have done the same for Abkhazia. Under international law,
the Montevideo Convention and the Soviet legislation controlling at
the time of Karabagh’s referendum on independence, the juridical
underpinnings of its sovereignty are as strong as, if not more
solid than, the aforementioned examples. Kosovo’s "sui generis"
argument uses a fancy label that betrays a false distinction without
a true difference. All the countries that recognized either Kosovo or
Abkhazia, if the rule of laws and rights is important to them, must
move immediately to recognize the Republic of Mountainous Karabagh
within its constitutional borders. Armenia and Turkey should lead
the way.

As for the polemical scoring point of "occupied" territories and
the return of refugees, the case is closed on these consequences of
Azerbaijan’s failed war of aggression against Karabagh. And it will
remain closed until and unless a) Turkey releases from occupation
the Armenian provinces currently under its control and allows for the
descendants’ exercise of the right of return to their national home;
and b) Azerbaijan lifts its occupation of the Armenian territories of
Shahumian, Getashen and Nakhichevan, pays for the brutal and documented
destruction in December 2005 of the Armenian cultural wonder called
Jugha, provides a right of return and compensation to the 400,000
Armenian refugees from Mountainous Karabagh and Azerbaijan, recognizes
Karabagh and then enters into formal negotiations with it to finalize
issues of border adjustment and delineation, trade and communications,
peace and public safety.

These are but a few of the priority items that need be included in
the agenda of "linkage" that official Ankara has long promoted. If its
insistence is anything more than partisan puff or an escape hatch from
political accountability, then the time is ripe for laying everything
on the line, presenting in civil fashion the pre- and post-conditions
of choice, and deciding which matters can be tackled diplomatically and
which require recourse to the tribunals of law. This process alone,
without prejudice to its results, just might take the parties and
their partnership to the hope of unprecedented normalization and the
promise of a long-awaited reconciliation between their peoples.

For policymaker and pundit alike, the road to regional integration in
a new-age community of democratic values and global security, to the
Caucasus, Central Asia and Afghanistan, to energy sourcing and other
strategic priorities passes right through the long irrelevant but
now tectonic killing fields of old Armenia. If the future is meant to
count, no measure of NATO membership or geopolitical self-importance
or moderate-Islam grandstanding can prevent the ultimate harmony of
renaissance and realpolitik.

Raffi Hovannisian, a member of Parliament, is founding director of
the Armenian Center for National and International Studies.