STUCK IN 1915 HOW TURKEY AND ARMENIA BLEW THEIR BIG CHANCE AT PEACE.
THOMAS DE WAAL
Foreign Policy
April 15 2010
Not many borders are closed in our globalized world, but the frontier
between Armenia and Turkey is still a dead zone where the railroad
stops. The closed border is a strange anomaly in the new Europe
that stems from two old tragedies: the still unresolved conflict
of the early 1990s between Armenia and Turkey’s ally Azerbaijan,
and the catastrophe of 1915 when the entire Armenian population of
eastern Anatolia was deported or killed in the dying days of the
Ottoman Empire.
People on both sides of this closed border want it open. Last month I
flew between the Armenian capital of Yerevan and Istanbul — the two
countries do at least have an air connection. The standard look of the
Armenian businessmen packing the plane was slightly menacing at first.
They all had dark leather jackets and hair cut short to the scalp,
concealing a cheerful friendliness toward Turks. The two men sitting
next to me wanted to be able to send the carpets, doors, and windows
they currently buy in Turkey, and dispatch to Armenia in a roundabout
route via Georgia, directly home across an open border.
In Istanbul, the thoughtful Turkish academic Cengiz Aktar told me
why he thinks that Turkey will be liberated if it faces up to the
truth of what happened to its missing Armenians. Aktar initiated an
Internet petition apologizing for the "Great Catastrophe" of 1915
(adopting the Armenians’ own phrase for the tragedy) and expressing
sympathy for "my Armenian brothers and sisters." More than 30,000
Turks have signed it — remarkable for a country whose schoolbooks
were, until recently, saying that Armenians killed Turks in the dying
days of the Ottoman Empire and not the other way around. It is not an
easy process, but the taboo on discussing the issue of what happened
to the missing Armenians has now been lifted in Turkey.
For a little while it seemed as if the governments in Yerevan and
Ankara were also defying their region’s dark historical determinism.
Last October, the Armenian and Turkish presidents, Serzh Sargsyan and
Abdullah Gul, moved to sign two protocols on normalizing relations,
pledging that, once the documents were ratified by their countries’
parliaments, the closed border would open within two months. Six months
on, insecurities and local politics are again winning the day, and the
protocols are in trouble. Turkish leaders are postponing ratification
of the agreements. An April 12 meeting between Sargsyan and Turkey’s
powerful prime minister, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, in Washington on the
sidelines of the Nuclear Security Summit, was a last-ditch attempt
to broker a rescue, but the initial omens from it are not good.
What has gone wrong? Ankara has gone cool on the process, saying
it wants to see progress on the Armenian-Azerbaijani conflict over
Nagorno-Karabakh — even though the conflict is not mentioned in
the protocols. The Turks clearly did not expect the furious reaction
the rapprochement would have with Azerbaijan, the losing side in the
conflict over the disputed province in the early 1990s. One-seventh
of Azerbaijan’s de jure territory is still under Armenian control, and
in 1993, Turkey closed its border with Armenia in solidarity with its
Turkic ally. Azerbaijan has been lobbying hard and effectively against
the protocols, and its fears are understandable — it is worried that
if the Armenia-Turkey border opens, a key lever of influence on the
Armenians to make concessions over Nagorno-Karabakh will be lost.
That might be true in the short term, but in the long run the opening
of the border would be bound to transform the South Caucasus region
and have a positive effect on the deep-set Nagorno-Karabakh conflict
as well. The Turks would become a neutral player in the Caucasus and
have positive leverage there for the first time. Alas, this kind of
long-term thinking is not the norm in this region.
Another complication is the approach of April 24, the date marked as
Armenian Genocide Day. As always, the coming anniversary is fraying
tempers, as Armenians make their annual push for the U.S. president
and Congress to term the 1915 killings "genocide," infuriating Turkey.
Sargsyan has endured much criticism from diaspora Armenians for his
rapprochement with Turkey. He is now under pressure to withdraw his
signature from the protocols and ward off criticism at home and in
the diaspora that he has allowed the Turks to string him along.
A short-term fix is needed to overcome the immediate danger of a
collapse in the process, one that the U.S. administration might have
only a few days to try to engineer. But there is also a longer-term
challenge here — how to pull the South Caucasus region as a whole
out of its historical cycle of mistrust and deadlock. Local actors
appear trapped, afraid to break the recurring negative dynamics that
keep borders and minds closed. A broader long-term strategy akin to
the one that has slowly turned around the Balkans in the last decade
and a half is needed here.
That means making a much greater commitment to untying the biggest
knot tangling up the area between the Black and Caspian Seas, the
Armenian-Azerbaijani conflict over Nagorno-Karabakh. Currently the
international resources being invested in the Nagorno-Karabakh peace
process are much too small to make a difference. The conflict is
dormant, but there is no room for complacency. Oil-rich Azerbaijan
now spends more than $2 billion a year on its military budget, more
than Armenia’s entire annual budget. A few years down the line this
could lead Azerbaijan into an attempt to reconquer Nagorno-Karabakh
by force, triggering a regional war that would shake the area between
Russia, Turkey, and Iran.
The United States could also invest in some long-term thinking on
the Armenian-Turkish issue, making reconciliation its strategic goal
and not treating it as a problem that flashes up as a red light once
a year, close to Armenian Genocide Day. In recent years, the issue
of whether the U.S. president will use the "G word" — genocide —
in his annual April 24 statement has degraded what should be the
commemoration of a historical tragedy into grubby political bargaining.
A key date, the centenary of the Armenian holocaust in 2015, is
glimmering over the horizon and can be a useful star for Turks,
Armenians — and President Barack Obama — to be guided by. The
Turkish government should recognize that it has five years to
come up with a better response to the Armenian question before
the whole world commemorates the 100th anniversary of the Armenian
holocaust. By pushing the question five years into the future, Obama
would be respectfully but gravely giving the Turkish government a
chance to catch up with the growing debate in its own society. If
on April 24 he says, "In five years’ time I will be marking the
centenary of the Great Catastrophe of 1915. I hope to be marking it
with our Turkish friends and not without them," he will start to
be a catalyst for reconciliation rather than just a player in the
perpetual Armenian-Turkish quarrel.
Thomas de Waal is senior associate for the Caucasus with the Carnegie
Endowment for International Peace.