Agence France Presse
April 8, 2010 Thursday 11:40 AM GMT

Turkey envoy to brief Azerbaijan on Armenia deal: minister

Ankara, April 8 2010

Turkey will send a top diplomat to Azerbaijan to dispel its close
ally’s concerns over revitalized Turkish efforts for reconciliation
with Armenia, officials said Thursday.

The envoy — foreign ministry undersecretary Feridun Sinirlioglu —
will visit Baku on Friday, bearing a letter from Prime Minister Recep
Tayyip Erdogan, two days after he made a similar visit to Yerevan,
Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoglu told reporters here.

"We hope to achieve normalization between Turkey and Armenia by
carrying the (Armenia reconciliation) process further in the right
direction in the coming weeks," he said.

Azerbaijan — linked to Turkey with close ethnic, political and
economic bonds — was angered by a historic deal Ankara and Yerevan
signed in October to end decades of hostility, establish diplomatic
ties and open their border, wary that Turkish support for its own
disputes with Armenia will now wane.

A senior Turkish diplomat said Sinirlioglu will meet Azerbaijani
President Ilham Aliyev and Foreign Minister Elmar Mammadyarov,
stressing that Ankara’s standing on the Nagorny-Karabakh conflict
between Azerbaijan and Armenia remained unchanged.

"It is obvious that (Nagorny-Karabakh) is part of the whole," the
diplomat, speaking on condition of anonymity, said.

Ankara says progress over Nagorny-Karabakh will be a determining
factor in Turkish-Armenian reconciliation while Yerevan rejects any
link between the two issues.

Ankara sealed its border with Armenia in 1993 in a show of solidarity
with Baku after ethnic Armenian separatists, backed by Yerevan, seized
the Nagorny Karabakh region and seven surrounding districts from
Azerbaijan in a war that claimed an estimated 30,000 lives.

Sinirlioglu’s mission to Baku follows his visit to Yerevan Wednesday,
during which he discussed steps to resolve the impasse in peace
efforts and secured agreement on a meeting next week between the two
countries’ leaders, on the sidelines of an international gathering in
Washington.

The peace deal — comprised of two protocols which need parliamentary
ratification in both countries — has been snagged by disagreements
over its terms.

Turkey and Armenia have long been estranged over Armenian alleagations
that up to 1.5 million of their kin were victims of genocide at the
hands of their Ottoman rulers during World War I.

Turkey rejects the genocide label and says the number of those killed
in what was war-time chaos is exaggerated.