TURKEY AND ARMENIA NEAR FRIENDSHIP PACT
By Marc Champion And Nicholas Birchin
WSJ
OCTOBER 7, 2009
Erdogan Says Deal Will Come Saturday
Turkey dropped a key condition to signing a protocol on Saturday
that would reopen its border with Armenia and establish diplomatic
relations between the two nations, divided for generations by a
dispute over genocide.
Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey said in an interview with
The Wall Street Journal that the signing wasn’t dependent on progress
at talks to be held in Moldova this week between the leaders of Armenia
and Azerbaijan over their territorial conflict in Nagorno Karabakh.
It was because of Armenia’s effective occupation of Nagorno Karabakh,
an ethnic Armenian enclave in Azerbaijan, that Turkey closed the
border in 1993. An earlier attempt to sign the protocol in April
stalled when Mr.
Erdogan said it could go forward only if the Karabakh conflict was
resolved first.
"The agreement will be signed on Oct. 10. It doesn’t have anything
to do with what happens in Moldova," said Mr. Erdogan, speaking in
Istanbul on Sunday.
The travails of a large concrete monument to unity between the two
peoples, built last year in the Turkish border town of Kars, show
why a true rapprochement is proving so hard to pull off and could yet
derail. The statue of two 30-meter tall human figures, standing face
to face on a hill above the city, is incomplete: A giant hand that
would join the figures was never attached. It lies abandoned on the
gravel below. The monument is now under threat of destruction.
"Small-minded people blocked the monument and they will block the peace
process too," says Naif Alibeyoglu, who had the statue built when he
was mayor of Kars. His 10 years in office ended in March. "You wait and
see, [the deal] will end up like my statue: a statue without hands."
The parliaments of Armenia and Turkey need to ratify the protocol for
it to take force, something Mr. Erdogan said he couldn’t guarantee, as
parliamentarians in Ankara would have a free vote in a secret ballot.
In an exclusive interview, Turkey’s Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan
discusses Iran’s nuclear aspirations, Israel and the ongoing border
dispute with Armenia.
Mr. Erdogan also said the two processes — a resolution of the Karabakh
conflict and rapprochement between Turkey and Armenia — remain linked,
and that a positive outcome in Moldova would help overall. Turkish
officials have continued to indicate the border could take longer to
open than the three months set out in the three-page protocol.
The Turkish leader said the only obstacle to signing the deal on
Saturday would come if Armenia seeks to alter the text. "This is
perhaps the most important point — that Armenia should not allow its
policies to be taken hostage by the Armenian diaspora," Mr. Erdogan
said. Much of Armenia’s large diaspora opposes the protocol.
A spokesman for Armenia President Serzh Sargsyan declined to comment
on whether Armenia would seek changes to the protocol. He said the
government would make a statement on "steps" concerning the protocol
soon.
Mr. Sargsyan has spent the week on a multination tour to explain his
position to diaspora groups, some of which have protested against
it. They believe it will be used by Turkey to reduce international
pressure on it to recognize as genocide the 1915 slaughter of
up to 1.5 million ethnic Armenians in what was then the Ottoman
Empire. Mr. Sargsyan visited Paris, New York, Los Angeles and, on
Tuesday, Beirut, where 2000 Armenians turned out waving banners such
as "we will not forget," according to news agency reports. His last
stop will be in Russia.
The rapprochement between Turkey and Armenia has strong backing
from the U.S. and the European Union. They hope the change could
trigger a virtuous cycle, opening up and stabilizing a region that
is increasingly important for oil and gas transit and last year saw
war between Russia and Georgia.
In addition to eventually opening the border and establishing
diplomatic relations, the protocol would also recognize the current
frontier. It would set up a joint commission to review issues of
history, likely to include the 1915 massacres. Turkey says they were
collateral deaths during what amounted to civil war during World War I.
Mr. Alibeyoglu, the former Kars mayor, worked hard to improve relations
between his city — a former Armenian capital that changed hands
and populations several times over centuries — and its natural
hinterland, the Caucasus. He invited Armenian, Azeri and Georgian
artists to festivals, signed twinning agreements with cities across
the region and, in 2004, gathered 50,000 signatures for a petition
demanding the opening of the Turkish-Armenian border.
Kars would stand to benefit from the ability to trade across a border
40 kilometers away by train and truck. Currently, traders must drive
hundreds of kilometers via Georgia.
But history has created deep suspicions. When Russia took over Kars
in the 19th century, many Armenians returned, only to be driven out
again during World War I. Today, some 20% of the city’s population
are ethnic Azerbaijanis, who consider opening the border while Armenia
remains in control of a fifth of Azerbaijan’s territory a betrayal.
Sculptor Mehmet Aksoy says he had to abandon his plan to run water down
the statues to pool as tears, because nationalists complained these
would be tears of Armenian rejoicing at reclaiming territory. Indeed,
one complaint of nationalist opponents of the protocol in Armenia
is that the treaty’s recognition of current borders would prevent
any future claim to the swathe of Eastern Turkey that Armenia won
in a 1920 treaty, only to lose it again in the 1921 Treaty of Kars
between Russia and Turkey.
"Why is one figure standing with its head bowed, as if ashamed?" asks
Oktay Aktas, an ethnic Azeri and local head of the Nationalist Action
Party, or MHP, who wants the statue torn down. "Turkey has nothing
to be ashamed of."
In fact, the two figures in the monument stand ramrod straight.
Nationalists on the other side of the border have taken to the
streets to protest against the pact with Turkey. "Turkey will cite the
protocol and proceed with its efforts to rewrite history," and deny
the genocide, said Vartan Oksanian, a former Armenian foreign minister
from the nationalist Dashnak party in a recent speech. He called for
the clause on the joint history commission and on recognition of the
border to be removed from the text.
Mr. Alibeyoglu says he planned the monument as a counterweight to a
memorial in Yerevan to the 1915 massacres and a statue in the nearby
Turkish town of Igdir, close to Mount Ararat. The Igdir monument
commemorates a much smaller number of Turks who were killed by ethnic
Armenian militias around the same time.
Turkey and Armenia are "like two neighbors who do not know each
other," Mr.
Alibeyoglu says. "Is he a terrorist? A mafioso? We needed to break
the ice."
But Mr. Alibeyoglu was running ahead of his own party, Mr. Erdogan’s
ruling Justice and Development party, or AKP. The government began
secret talks with Armenia two years ago, and relations really only
took off in September 2008, when Turkey’s president went to watch the
Turkish football team playing Armenia in Yerevan. He was the first
Turkish leader ever to visit Armenia. Mr. Sargsyan is due to close
the circle by attending the return match in Turkey next week.
Mr. Alibeyoglu failed to get backing for his projects and was
shunted aside by the AKP in the run-up to municipal elections this
year. When Mr. Aktas applied to Turkey’s Commission for Monuments to
get construction stopped, on the basis that a viewing platform for
the monument was built without planning permission, the commission
ordered work the statue to be demolished. Its fate awaits a final
decision from the central government in Ankara