DEAL BETWEEN TURKEY AND ARMENIA HALTED OVER ‘UNACCEPTABLE CONDITIONS’ THOMAS SEIBERT, FOREIGN CORRESPONDENT

The National
rticle?AID=/20100122/FOREIGN/701219848/1135/WEEKEN DER
Jan 21 2010
UAE

ISTANBUL // Efforts to ratify ground-breaking agreements between
Turkey and Armenia have been dealt a serious blow as Turkey says
a recent Armenian court decision establishes new and unacceptable
conditions for a rapprochement between the two neighbours.

Observers say Ankara, faced with strong domestic resistance, seems to
be looking for excuses to delay the implementation of the agreements.

"Armenia has started an operation on the text" of the agreements,
Recep Tayyip Erdogan, the Turkish prime minister, told journalists
during a visit to Saudi Arabia this week. The Armenian move was
"totally unacceptable", he said.

Mr Erdogan was referring to a recent decision by Armenia’s
constitutional court that cleared the way for a parliamentary
ratification of the agreements signed with Turkey last year.

Ankara says the court decision, while confirming that the agreements
did not violate Armenia’s constitution, contained several unacceptable
points. The foreign minister Ahmet Davutoglu voiced Turkish concerns
in a telephone conversation with Edward Nalbandian, his Armenian
counterpart.

But some observers in Turkey say Ankara’s stated discomfort is
really an effort to blame the Armenian side for a lack of progress
in the reconciliation efforts between the neighbouring states. "The
government is either fooling itself or trying to fool the world,"
Erdal Guven, a columnist, wrote in yesterday’s Radikal newspaper. "I
do not know which is worse."

After months of secret negotiations under Swiss moderation, Mr
Davutoglu and Mr Nalbandian last October signed two protocols designed
to put Turkish-Armenian relations on a new footing.

The agreements say the two countries are ready to establish diplomatic
relations, open the closed border between them and create a joint
commission of historians that will look at the causes that led to
the death of hundreds of thousands of Armenians during massacres in
the final days of the Ottoman Empire 1915.

Armenia and much of the international community say the massacres
constituted genocide, a description that Turkey rejects.

The signing of the protocols in Zurich was seen as a historic step of
reconciliation. Turkey’s government sent the agreements to parliament
soon after the ceremony in Switzerland. But so far, neither country has
ratified the agreements. Now Turkey says the Armenian constitutional
court has complicated matters further.

The court ruled on January 12 that the protocols were covered by the
constitution, but could not be interpreted in a way that contradicted
Paragraph 11 of Armenia’s declaration of independence, according to an
unofficial translation of the decision posted on the court’s website.

The paragraph of the declaration of independence says that "Armenia
stands in support of the task of achieving international recognition
of the 1915 Genocide in Ottoman Turkey and Western Armenia".

Turkey also objects to another point in the ruling that says the
protocols do not concern "any third party".

Ankara sees that as a reference to the conflict between Armenia and
the Turkish ally Azerbaijan over the territory of Nagorny-Karabakh,
an Armenian enclave on Azeri territory.

Although the Karabakh conflict is not mentioned in the protocols,
the Turkish government has said repeatedly that its parliament would
ratify the agreements only if Armenian forces start to withdraw from
the region.

Following the court ruling, the Turkish foreign ministry said the
Armenian side had hurt the process of rapprochement between the
two countries.

"This decision contains preconditions and restrictive provisions
which impair the letter and spirit of the Protocols," the ministry
said in a statement.

Mr Erdogan’s government has been facing strong opposition from
nationalists who accuse him of turning his back on Azerbaijan by
signing the agreements with Armenia.

The opposition leader Deniz Baykal said the Armenian court decision
had dealt a deadly blow to the protocols. The government’s initiative
to mend ties with Armenia had ended with a "fiasco".

Devlet Bahceli, leader of the right-wing Nationalist Action Party,
or MHP, called on Mr Erdogan to withdraw the protocols from parliament.

Observers say the very fact that Mr Erdogan linked the ratification of
the protocols to the Karabakh question was a consequence of nationalist
pressure at home and of complaints from Azerbaijan.

"This is the weakest rung in the government’s Armenian initiative,"
wrote Semih Idiz, a columnist for the Milliyet daily. He noted
the government had started to work for reconciliation with Armenia
"without taking into account the opposition coming from Azerbaijan
and nationalist groups in Turkey".

Only after coming under pressure from those two camps did Mr Erdogan
introduce the "Karabakh precondition", Idiz wrote.

By saying that Turkey will only ratify the protocols if Armenia
withdraws from Karabakh, the government in Ankara has in effect tied
its own stated interest of improving relations with Yerevan to the
resolution of a conflict beyond its borders that Turkey has very
limited influence on, Guven wrote in Radikal.

Now the government was trying to use the Armenian court decision
to blame the lack of progress on Yerevan. "I have my doubts whether
there are many people outside Turkey who will believe that," he wrote.