ERDOGAN PLANS VISIT TO BAKU SOON FOR TALKS ON ARMENIA

Today’s Zaman
May 6 2010
Turkey

Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan disclosed his plans for visiting
Baku after concluding debates on a constitutional reform package
during an informal question-and-answer session with reporters on
Tuesday night outside Parliament’s General Assembly Hall.

At a time when the normalization process between Armenia and Turkey
have come to a standstill, Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan has been
planning to pay a visit to the two countries’ neighbor, Azerbaijan.

Erdogan disclosed his plans for visiting Baku during an informal
question-and-answer session with reporters on Tuesday night outside
Parliament’s General Assembly Hall during ongoing intense debates on
a constitutional reform package. The prime minister didn’t elaborate
on a date for his visit, yet it is expected to be after debates and
voting over the reform package are finalized, which means within days.

Erdogan is already scheduled to pay an official visit to Athens on
May 14-15, and sources said a Baku visit is likely to take place just
after the Greece visit, probably on May 17. However, the same sources
highlighted that no exact date has been set.

Most recently, Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoglu voiced Turkey’s
insistence on parallel progress on the normalization process with
Armenia and on the Nagorno-Karabakh territorial dispute between
Armenia and Azerbaijan.

Delivering a keynote lecture on Saturday at the University of Oxford’s
St. Antony’s College, Davutoglu touched upon the recent course of
affairs regarding the stalled normalization process between Armenia
and Turkey.

"For sure, we want to open our border because we want full integration
with our neighbors. However, opening the Turkey-Armenia border will
not be sufficient; we want to open the Armenia-Azerbaijan border as
well so that regional stability can be maintained," Davutoglu said.

Last October, Davutoglu and his Armenian counterpart, Edward
Nalbandian, signed two protocols for restoring diplomatic ties
between their countries and re-opening the two countries’ joint
border, but they have yet to be ratified in the national parliaments
— a necessary condition for their implementation — amid mutual
accusations of belatedly added preconditions. Turkey says a decision
by the Constitutional Court of Armenia on the protocols interprets
them in a way that misrepresents their objectives. Armenia, on the
other hand, says Turkey has linked the process to the Nagorno-Karabakh
dispute between Armenia and Azerbaijan although this goes against
the text of the protocols.

"The Turkish-Armenian borders could be opened in the first stage
only under the conditions of withdrawal of Armenian troops from five
occupied regions of Azerbaijan and the Lachin corridor. It will create
conditions for Turkish-Armenian cooperation as well as trilateral
trade relations between Turkey, Azerbaijan and Armenia. Rejecting
all these conditions, Armenia lost everything. Armenia can lose good
prospects because of the political views of President [Serzh] Sarksyan
or anyone else," Azerbaijani Deputy Foreign Minister Araz Azimov,
who is also a special representative of Azerbaijani President Ilham
Aliyev for the settlement of Nagorno-Karabakh, said earlier this week.

While speaking about a bilateral meeting with Sarksyan, which was
held in Washington in early April, Erdogan later that month said:
"We underlined the fact that relations between Armenia and Azerbaijan
and reaching a resolution over rayons [administrative units greater
than a district but smaller than a province which surround the
Nagorno-Karabakh region] will be determining factors in implementing
the protocols."