Agence France Presse
February 5, 2010 Friday 12:26 PM GMT

US urges progress on stalled Armenia-Turkey deal

TBILISI, Feb 5 2010

A top US diplomat on Friday urged Armenia and Turkey to waste no more
time in moving forward on stalled efforts to establish ties and open
their border after decades of hostility.

"I very much hope that both Armenia and Turkey will move forward. I
don’t think delay is in anybody’s interest," US Deputy Secretary of
State James Steinberg said during a visit to the Caucasus region.

Steinberg met with Armenian President Serzh Sarkisian on Thursday and
was expected to meet Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev and Turkish
Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoglu at a weekend security conference in
Munich, Germany.

Speaking to reporters in the Georgian capital Tbilisi, Steinberg said
he had "extremely productive and substantive discussions" with
Sarkisian in Armenia and that he would speak with Davutoglu about how
to move swiftly forward.

"There’s a very strong commitment on behalf of the United States to
work with Armenia and Turkey to see the ratification of the
protocols," he said.

Turkey and Armenia signed two protocols in October to establish
diplomatic ties and reopen their shared border, in a historic step
towards ending decades of hostility stemming from World War I-era
massacres of Armenians under Ottoman Turks.

The protocols must now be ratified by both countries’ parliaments but
the process has stalled as the two sides have traded accusations of
trying to modify the landmark deal.

Ankara has accused Yerevan of trying to set new conditions after
Armenia’s constitutional court said the protocols could not contradict
Yerevan’s official position that the Armenian mass killings
constituted genocide — a label Turkey fiercely rejects.

Armenia, for its part, is furious over Ankara’s insistence that
normalising Turkish-Armenian ties depends on progress between Armenia
and Turkish ally Azerbaijan over the disputed Nagorny Karabakh region.

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