ARMENIA SHRUGS OFF TURKISH “HYSTERIA” AS ERDOGAN SAYS SARGSYAN OWES APOLOGY OVER “WESTERN ARMENIA” COMMENT
Gayane Abrahamyan

ArmeniaNow
28.07.11

In his public statement while on a visit to Azerbaijan on Wednesday
Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan said Armenian President
Serzh Sargsyan should apologize for “calling on school children to
occupy eastern Turkey.”

At a joint press conference in Baku with Azerbaijani President Ilham
Aliyev, the Turkish leader reportedly said Sargsyan’s remarks “did
not befit a statesman” and called them a “historical mistake” that
“should be corrected.”

Erdogan made a reference to President Sargsyan’s statement at a
meeting with participants of the 5th Pan-Armenian Olympiad and
students sponsored by the Luys Foundation that took place in the
Armenian resort town of Tsaghkadzor last Saturday.

In answering the question asked by one of the participants — which
was: “Will our future be reminiscent of the Batum agreement, when in
a German diplomat’s words, we were left with a territory just enough
to swim in Lake Sevan, but with no room for drying up, or it will be
a future that will return Western Armenia, along with Mt. Ararat?” —
Sargsyan, according to his press office, said:

“It depends on you and your generation. I believe my generation
has fulfilled the task in front of us; when it was necessary at the
beginning of the 1990s to defend part of our fatherland – Karabakh –
from the enemy, we did it.”

Sargsyan concluded his long answer by giving assurances that “in many
cases the country’s standing is not conditioned by its territory:
the country should be modern, it should be secure and prosperous,
and these are conditions which allow any nation to sit next to the
respectable, powerful and reputed nations of the world.”

Turkey’s Foreign Ministry took the Armenian president’s statement as
a call on schoolchildren for “eastern Turkey’s occupation”, which,
it said in a statement, is a “very irresponsible behavior not becoming
of the head of state.”

According to the Turkish Today’s Zaman newspaper, in Baku Erdogan said
that “Sargsyan’s behavior is a provocation and an attempt to fill youth
with hatred”. He said this will “lead Armenia’s youth into darkness.”

“Sargsyan has made a very serious mistake… he must apologize,”
Erdogan, reportedly, emphasized.

Earlier, Armenia’s Deputy Foreign Minister Shavarsh Kocharyan said that
“the Turkish hysteria over Sargsyan’s statement is not only artificial,
but also should be an occasion for many to make conclusions.”

“I have the impression that the Turks have simply not read the
complete answer to the question or that they are just unanimously
voicing what they wish to voice, by clinging to separate parts of
the statement. Actually the answer of the president of Armenia to
such a question was serious, comprehensive and quite measured, and
if it is not perceived in Turkey, then they simply do not need it,”
the senior Armenian diplomat stressed.