GENOCIDE DISPUTE NOT ONLY REASON TRAINS DON’T RUN FROM ARMENIA TO TURKEY

Fresno Bee
April 20 2015

By Roy Gutman

GYUMRI, Armenia — The train to Turkey hasn’t left the station in
the Armenian border town of Gyumri for 22 years, and many here fear
it never will. But if Turkey should unexpectedly reopen the gates,
a lot of Armenians will be on board, eager to see the country their
ancestors fled 100 years ago amid massacres and mass deportations.

“The soil there, I want to go back and farm it,” Stepan Bagouryan, 30,
a machinist from Gyumri, said as he boarded a ramshackle passenger
train to Yerevan, the Armenian capital. His great grandfather fled
the city of Mus, in eastern Turkey. “Why shouldn’t we go back? It is
our homeland.”

Turkey closed the link in 1993 to show solidarity with its regional
ally, Azerbaijan, after Armenian troops occupied the tiny enclave of
Nagorno Karabach. It’s been closed ever since.

Then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton intervened in 2009 to resolve
the matter, and Armenia and Turkey agreed to establish diplomatic
relations and reopen the border. But the agreement fell victim to
the region’s many conflicts and has yet to be implemented.

Azerbaijan, which shares religious and linguistic ties with Turkey
and is a major outside investor in its Turkish economy, cried betrayal.

Armenia still had troops inside territory Azerbaijan claimed. It also
had captured a buffer zone surrounding the enclave, whose population
of 130,000 is overwhelmingly Armenian.

So Turkey asked Armenia make a show of goodwill and abandon at least
one of the buffer zone’s seven districts. Armenia refused.

The 2009 accords also called for an international commission to
look at the historical record and assemble facts that would enable
discussion of the two countries’ very different interpretations of
the deportations and massacres of 1915 that killed perhaps a million
Armenians and which most label genocide. But after leaders of the
Armenian diaspora accused President Serzh Sargsyan of betraying
Armenian interests by agreeing to discuss the history, that initiative
died as well.

After four years, neither side had submitted the twin protocols to
their respective parliaments for approval, and on Feb. 16, Sargsyan
formally withdrew them, blaming a lack of will by Turkey.

Although both sides have made gestures in the past – Sargsyan,
for example sent his foreign minister to Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s
inauguration as president last year – neither side is willing to
contemplate taking a bold unilateral step to end the impasse.

“We think the blockade is illegal, and we do think it needs to
be eliminated as soon as possible, and the earlier the better,”
said Vigan Sargsyan, chief of staff to President Sargsyan (he’s not
related to the president. He said Armenia has no preconditions.

“We don’t think that to open a border you need to reconcile. We think
that reconciliation or friendship are future steps.”

“We want regular relations with Armenia on the basis of bilateral
interests, but on the basis of realpolitik, it’s not so easy,” a
Turkish official told McClatchy in Ankara. “If they will retreat from
one or two (districts), it will give us the possibility of de-blocking
everything,” said the official, who spoke only on the condition of
anonymity because of the sensitivity of the subject.

The U.S. says the ball is in Turkey’s court. “Responsibility for
moving forward lies with the Turkish government,” the new U.S.

ambassador, Richard Mills, said at his confirmation hearings in
September. He called for final approval of the two accords “without
pre-conditions or linkage to other issues.”

But agreement, on anything, seems a distant hope.

For one, Armenia is incensed that Turkey chose April 24, the day
of Armenia’s long planned commemoration of the centennial of the
Armenian exodus from Turkey, to invite the world’s powers to Turkey
mark another 1915 event, the failed allied landing at Gallipoli. The
Ottoman Empire repulsed the April 25 landing by Russia, France and
Britain, and the battle went on for eight months. The Turks think of
it as a defining moment in their fight to remain independent after
the collapse of the Ottomans.

In January, Erdogan invited his Armenian counterpart to attend the
Gallipoli commemoration. Sargsyan rejected it, and in an open letter
to Erdogan, chastised him for not even responding to the invitation
that Armenia had sent to the Yerevan ceremonies months earlier.

He charged that Turkey was continuing “its traditional policy of
denialism” surrounding the Armenian genocide and accused Erdogan of
setting the date for the Gallipoli events “to distract the attention
of the international community” from Armenia’s commemoration.

If the aim was to upstage Armenia, Erdogan appears to have succeeded.

At least 21 heads of state have agreed to attend the Gallipoli events,
according to Turkey’s foreign ministry; only two, the presidents of
France and Russia, are expected at Yerevan.

But Armenia hasn’t finished. At the end of January, Sargsyan,
together with other leading politicians and members of the Armenian
diaspora, issued a “Pan-Armenian” declaration that referred to the
1920 Treaty of Sevres and an arbitration by then President Woodrow
Wilson, which awarded an enormous part of Turkey to a new Armenian
state. The declaration called for preparing a file of legal claims to
restore “individual, communal and pan-Armenian rights and legitimate
interests.”

Turkish officials said the declaration could be read as a claim on
Turkish lands. Many Armenians agree.

“It would be strange if we did not lay out our grievances” on the
centennial of the slaughter, said chief of staff Sargsyan, when asked
about the declaration.

And in the view of Suren Manukyan, the deputy director of the Armenian
Genocide Museum in Yerevan, that region – about one seventh of the
landmass of today’s Turkey – should be restored to Armenians.

“It was the decision of President Wilson, who was chosen for
arbitration after the Sevres Treaty,” he said. “The implementation of
the decision of Wilson will be good compensation for all the killings,
all the tragedy.” Then, he added, “the real host of the land will
come back.”

Meanwhile, behind the scenes, believe it or not, efforts are under
way to restore the dialogue – after the twin commemorations of April
24 and after the Turkish elections on June 7.

According to U.S.-born Richard Giragosian, a former Capitol Hill
aide who directs the Regional Studies think-tank in Yerevan, Turkish
foreign ministry officials plan to come to Yerevan in mid-June during
a meeting of the NATO parliamentary assembly.

In landlocked Armenia, which has normal ties but rudimentary transport
links with Georgia and Iran, an opening to Turkey would be a welcomed
jolt to a moribund economy.

Today a resident of Yerevan who wants to visit Istanbul, where at
least 40,000 and possibly 100,000 Armenians are working illegally,
has few options for travel. There are twice weekly charter flights
that depart both countries in the middle of the night, a 36-hour
bus trip or one can make the six-hour drive to Tblisi, capital of
neighboring Georgia, over a swerving, potholed secondary road, then
catch a flight on to Istanbul.

Giragosian believes that may not be the situation for long. Based
on contacts he’s had with both the Turkish and Armenian governments,
he predicts the border will be open by 2017.

From: Baghdasarian