Rupee News, India
April 24 2010

Turkey’s Ottoman legacy

Posted on April 24, 2010 by The Editors Rupee News

Turkey’s Armenia problem just got complicated. Its relations with its
former territory, and now an independent country is part of the legacy
of the Ottoman Empire. Relations with Armenia are held hostage to
Armenia’s occupation of ‘Nagorno-Karabakh’ an enclave belonging to
Azerbaijan.

Azerbaijan has enjoyed good relations with Turkey and also one of the
former countries that used to belong to the Ottomans.

After the almost rejection of Turkey by the EU, Ankara has started to
look East towards Central Asia’s Turkic people. The ECO has started to
look a lot more attractive than it used to.

The breakdown in the normalization of relations between Turkey and
Armenia is not simply, as some Armenians are claiming, because of
Turkish unwillingness to accept the extent of the 1915 killings of
Armenian Turks or recognize them as genocide.

The administration of Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan appears to
have underestimated the wider effects of a wider rapprochement with
the Armenians. The Azeri government, which is in dispute with Armenia
over the Nagorno-Karabakh enclave, was incensed at the protocols to
build links between Ankara and Yerevan. As a result Erdogan flew to
Baku to assure the Azeris that the deal with the Armenians would not
be put forward for ratification by the Turkish Parliament, until some
progress was being made on the resolution of the issue of the enclave,
currently occupied by Armenian forces.

Erdogan’s statement in turn angered the Armenians, who pointed out
that in the protocols they inked with the Turks, there was no
reference whatsoever to Nagorno-Karabakh. Aware that the deal was
turning sour, in advance of the appearance of both countries at US
President Barack Obama’s recent Nuclear Security Summit, Erdogan sent
his foreign minister to Yerevan to see if he could fix up a meeting in
the US with Armenian President Serge Sarkisian. That meeting did not
happen. Instead, Yerevan Friday stopped the ratification process
blaming Turkey’s `inconsistent and evasive position and policy of
preconditions’. The Armenians also opened a new front in their drive
to have the Turks accept their contention that the 1915 massacres in
eastern Turkey saw 1.5 million perish and amounted to genocide. They
have invited Turkish historians to visit their national archive
containing some 7,000 documents relating to these events.

Although the 1915 slayings still loom large in the minds of Armenians,
they are past business. Nagorno-Karabakh is present business. It seems
extraordinary that Erdogan could have made the mistake of not alluding
to the Azeris’ concerns during original talks with the Armenians. Then
he compounded the error by assuring the Azeris that the protocols
would not be ratified before progress was made over Nagorno-Karabakh.
The Turkish diplomatic service remains one of the country’s most
efficient elites and would surely have warned Erdogan on both courses
of action.

Nationalists in both countries will be pleased that the reconciliation
process has been stymied, for the moment at least. Yet both Erdogan
and Sarkisian must surely realize the drivers which caused them each
to sign the protocols in Zurich in 2009 have not changed. For both
countries, the economic and strategic benefits of friendly relations
are considerable. For Ankara they represent the foundation on which
can be built wider connections with the rest of the Caucasus.
Azerbaijan could also benefit from good ties between Turkey and
Armenia, because Turkey could offer its good offices to help find a
settlement on the enclave. As things now stand again, no one is the
winner ‘ everyone, including the Azeris is losing out.

Armenia has to resolve the issue of Nagorno-Karabakh with
Azerbaijan`without which there can be no solution. Occupied land has
to be returned. Turkey must continue to build its relations with
Central Asia and the ECO`and this cannot be held hostage to Armenia.

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