ARMENIA, TURKEY TO CONTINUE IMPROVING RELATIONS
RIA Novosti
15:05 | 05/ 12/ 2008
YEREVAN, December 5 (RIA Novosti) – Armenia and Turkey have agreed to
continue talks on improving bilateral relations, the Armenian Foreign
Ministry said in a statement on Friday.
Armenian Foreign Minister Edvard Nalbandyan met with his Turkish
counterpart Ali Babacan in Helsinki, Finland on Thursday. "Nalbandyan
and Babacan agreed to continue talks," the ministry said.
The border between Turkey and ex-Soviet Armenia has been closed since
1993 on Ankara’s initiative. Turkey says Armenia must end attempts to
have the early 29th century massacre of Armenians in Turkey recognized
as an act of genocide, and must settle its territorial dispute with
Azerbaijan over Nagorny Karabakh. Turkey supports its fellow Muslim
nation Azerbaijan in the Karabakh conflict.
Turkey says the deaths and deportations of Armenians at the end of
the Ottoman period in 1915 were caused by civil war rather than an
act of genocide. However, the majority of Western academics qualify
the massacre, which took the lives of around one-and-a-half million
Armenians, as genocide.
The issue is a controversial one in Turkey, and in 2005 the Turkish
Nobel Literature Prize winner, Orhan Pamuk, was charged with insulting
his homeland after he commented in the Swiss media that, "Thirty
thousand Kurds have been killed here, and a million Armenians. And
almost nobody dares to mention that. So I do."
The charges were later dropped after an international outcry. However,
a hate campaign which saw the writer’s book burned on the streets of
Istanbul forced the writer to flee his homeland.
Turkish president Abdullah Gul recently made a historic visit to
the Armenian capital of Yerevan, where he attended a 2010 World Cup
qualifier between the two countries with his Armenian counterpart,
Serzh Sarkisian.
Turkey won the match 2-0.