ARMENIA, TURKEY AGREE TO CONTINUE RECONCILIATORY TALKS DESPITE RIFTS

Today’s Zaman
April 14 2010
Turkey

At a time when efforts to normalize their bilateral ties have been
stalled for a number of reasons, the leaders of Armenia and Turkey
agreed at a landmark meeting to continue these efforts despite visible
difficulties ahead.

Armenian President Serzh Sarksyan and Turkish Prime Minister Recep
Tayyip Erdogan held a rare bilateral meeting in Washington on Monday
on the sidelines of a two-day nuclear security summit hosted by US
President Barack Obama that started earlier on Monday at the Washington
Convention Center. The two leaders had held another rare meeting in
January 2009, when they both participated in an annual meeting of
the World Economic Forum (WEF) held in the ski resort town of Davos,
Switzerland.

The main item on the agenda of the almost one-and-a-half-hour-long
meeting was a detailed exchange of views on a letter recently sent
by Erdogan to Sarksyan, well-informed sources said. The letter was
sent via Feridun Sinirlioglu, the Foreign Ministry undersecretary,
who last week paid successive visits first to Yerevan and then to
Baku as Erdogan’s special envoy.

It contained a message that an agreement would better serve the
interests of the two countries, especially when compared to the cost
of the failure to achieve peace.

In addition to Armenian Foreign Minister Edward Nalbandian and
his Turkish counterpart, Ahmet Davutoglu, Armenian Presidential
Administration Deputy Chief of Staff Vigen Sargsyan and Sinirlioglu
attended the meeting.

The Armenian and Turkish sides agreed to continue efforts to normalize
their relations via contacts led by the foreign ministers of the two
countries, the same well-informed sources said. Yet, there was no other
statement on whether contentious issues regarding the process came
on the agenda of the meeting and if they did, what the leaders said.

As an outcome of closed-door talks that had been held for more
than a year through the mediation of Switzerland on ways to restore
diplomatic relations and open their mutual border, Ankara and Yerevan
announced almost a year ago, on April 22, 2009, that they had reached
an agreement on a road map to normalize their relations.

Overcoming painful ups and downs — particularly stemming from
uneasiness over Azerbaijan — the two countries took a landmark
step in Zurich in October when Davutoglu and Nalbandian signed two
protocols to establish diplomatic ties and re-open their border.

However, the process hit a rocky patch in January after an Armenian
court upheld the legality of the protocols but underlined that they
could not contradict Yerevan’s official position that the alleged
Armenian genocide must be internationally recognized. Turkey accused
Yerevan of trying to set conditions on the deals. The process of
normalization has also been crippled by Turkey’s insistence on parallel
progress on the Nagorno-Karabakh territorial dispute between Armenia
and Azerbaijan.

According to Turkish media reports, during the meeting, Erdogan
recalled that Turkey expects development in the resolution of the
Nagorno-Karabakh dispute, while Sarksyan said Turkey could not impose
this as a precondition. The Turkish side also expressed uneasiness
over the Armenian-American diaspora’s intense lobbying efforts for
official recognition of the alleged genocide, underlining that those
efforts have been harmful to the efforts at normalization.

‘Language of conditions’ Despite the absence of a joint statement
following their meeting, Armenian and Turkish leaders, in remarks
delivered separately following the meeting, reiterated their well-known
positions.

Speaking at George Mason University’s new Center for Global Islamic
Studies in Fairfax, Virginia, Erdogan criticized a long-running effort
in the US Congress to pass a resolution declaring that Anatolian
Armenians were victims of genocide nearly a century ago.

"We are against a one-sided interpretation of history," Erdogan said.

"History cannot be written in parliament and judged by parliament."

Turkey recalled its US ambassador last month in protest after the
Committee on Foreign Affairs in the House of Representatives passed
a resolution declaring that the Ottoman-era killings amounted to
genocide. The full House has yet to vote on the resolution.

The venue for Sarksyan’s remarks was Washington National Cathedral
as he laid a wreath at the tomb of US President Woodrow Wilson
(1856-1924), known as the architect of the "Wilsonian Armenia," the
boundary for an Armenian state drawn up by Wilson for the Treaty of
Sèvres, which was imposed on the Ottoman government by the victorious
Western powers at the end of World War I.

"This morning I met with the prime minister of Turkey. Our position has
been and remains very straightforward. Turkey cannot speak with Armenia
and the Armenian people in the language of conditions. We will simply
not allow that. We are not preparing in any way to question the fact
of the Armenian Genocide, or to pretend that we believe that Turkey
can play any diplomatic role in the process of finding a solution to
the problem of Nagorno-Karabakh," Sarksyan was quoted as saying by
Armenian media as he spoke to members of the Armenian community there.

"Any new foreign policy is subject to temptations because we are
walking down a path no one has walked before. I am confident Armenia
will pass this exam with honor," Sarksyan also said in remarks
delivered in Armenian.

Later on Monday, Sarksyan held a bilateral meeting with Obama, who
has urged Armenia and Turkey to "make every effort" to advance the
normalization of relations between their two countries.

"The president commended President Sarksyan for his courageous efforts
to achieve normalization of relations between Armenia and Turkey
and encouraged him to fulfill the promise of normalization for the
benefit of the Armenian people," the White House said in a statement
after the meeting. "President Obama also urged that both Armenia and
Turkey make every effort to advance the normalization process and
achieve legislative ratification of the protocols of normalization,"
it said, adding that Obama voiced his support for Armenian democracy.

Erdogan hopeful Obama won’t use g-word Erdogan was scheduled to have
a bilateral meeting with Obama on Tuesday on the sidelines of the
summit, only days before April 24, the day Armenians claim marks
the anniversary of the beginning of a systematic genocide campaign
against Anatolian Armenians in the last years of the Ottoman Empire.

Last year, Obama avoided using the g-word in his message, although
he had pledged to recognize the Armenian diaspora’s genocide claims
in his election campaign.

In an interview with CNN International aired on Tuesday, Erdogan
said Turkey cannot accept that the killings were genocide and that
he was confident Obama would also not use the term. "That would be
my expectation, because to this day, no American leader has uttered
that word, and I believe President Obama will not," he said.

Noting that the time when the killings took place was a period of war
and revolts, he pointed out that the Turkish people also suffered
terrible losses during the 1914-18 conflict. "No nation, no people
has the right to impose the way it remembers history on another nation
or people — and Turkey does not try to do that."