TURKEY TO SEEK SWISS, US SUPPORT IN ARMENIA ROW

Hurriyet
Feb 3 2010
Turkey

Turkish Foreign Ministry Undersecretary Feridun Sinirlioglu, left,
with Turkish ambassador to Washington Namik Tan.

A top Turkish diplomat will travel to Switzerland and the United
States to seek their support over an Armenian court ruling that
Ankara says threatens historic reconciliation deals with Yerevan,
a foreign ministry spokesman said Wednesday.

Feridun Sinirlioglu, undersecretary at the ministry, "will visit
these two countries in the coming days to express our concern"
over the ruling last month by the Armenian constitutional court,
spokesman Burak Ozugergin told reporters.

After months of Swiss-mediation and U.S. encouragement, Turkey and
Armenia signed two protocols in October to establish diplomatic ties
and reopen their shared border, in a historic step toward ending
decades of hostility stemming from World War I-era killings of
Armenians under Ottoman Turks.

But the process hit the rocks after the Armenian court upheld
the legality of the protocols, but underlined that they could not
contradict Yerevan’s official position that the Armenian mass killings
constituted genocide — a label fiercely rejected by Ankara.

Turkey accused Armenia of trying to re-write and set new conditions
on the deals, while Yerevan warned that the rapprochement was under
threat of collapse.

Ozugergin said Ankara maintained its desire to build better ties with
its eastern neighbor.

"There is no problem in Turkey’s Armenian opening. But Armenia has
a problem with its Turkey opening," he added.

The reconciliation process is also complicated by Ankara’s insistence
that normalizing Turkish-Armenian ties depend on progress between
Armenia and neighboring Azerbaijan over the Nagorno-Karabakh dispute —
a link that Yerevan rejects.

Turkey closed its border with Armenia in 1993 in solidarity with
Azerbaijan after ethnic Armenian forces wrested Nagorno-Karabakh from
Baku’s control in a war that claimed an estimated 30,000 lives.