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Ankara: Turkey Scraps Flights To Armenia After Azeri Resistance

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  • Ankara: Turkey Scraps Flights To Armenia After Azeri Resistance

    TURKEY SCRAPS FLIGHTS TO ARMENIA AFTER AZERI RESISTANCE

    Today's Zaman, Turkey
    April 1 2013

    Turkey has cancelled the first ever scheduled Turkish flights to its
    long-time rival Armenia, days before the first plane was due to take
    off, officials have said, following fierce opposition from Turkey's
    ally and energy partner Azerbaijan.

    The twice-weekly flights between Turkey's eastern city of Van and the
    Armenian capital Yerevan were due to begin on April 3 and, encouraged
    by a US push for rapprochement, were meant to boost bilateral tourism
    and trade.

    But with just over a week until the first flight, and with tickets
    already on sale, Turkey's civil aviation authority stepped in and
    ordered the flights to be suspended.

    Officials at Turkey's transport ministry confirmed the flights had
    been stopped but declined to give a reason. BoraJet, the private
    Turkish carrier set to fly the 45-minute route, has also declined to
    comment on the stoppage.

    One BoraJet official twice denied the Van-Yerevan flights had ever
    been planned, even though the route was still available as a booking
    option on the firm's website on Monday.

    Narekavank Tour, a Yerevan-based travel agency which has spent the
    last three years organising the flights together with a Turkish travel
    agency in Van, said the reason was political.

    "The organisers were keen on staying away from politics. It is very sad
    and discouraging that Turkish authorities were not able to do the same
    and finally let politics interfere with this promising initiative,"
    it said in a statement.

    Asked if he thought this was due to specific pressure from Azerbaijan,
    Armen Hovhannisyan, co-founder of Narekavank Tour, said: "Of course,
    it's part of the whole formula, and maybe they have been working
    behind the scenes."

    Strained ties Officially at war, Armenia and Azerbaijan have been
    locked in a bitter dispute over the territory of Nagorno-Karabakh -
    a mountainous enclave within Azerbaijan with a majority Armenian
    population - which Armenian-backed forces seized along with seven
    surrounding Azeri districts in 1991.

    Turkey, which has never opened an embassy in Armenia, closed its
    land border in 1993 in a show of solidarity with Azerbaijan, a Muslim
    and Turkic-speaking ally which also supplies Ankara with billions of
    cubic metres of Caspian natural gas each year.

    Azerbaijan has voiced fierce opposition to the flights and last week
    Ali Hasanov, a senior official at the president's office in Baku,
    said they amounted to support for "the occupant country" and only
    prolonged the "occupation".

    "When such things are done by countries, which share the same strategic
    interests with Azerbaijan, we take it twice as fervently.

    It's not just our attitude, but an attitude of the whole Turkish
    society," Hasanov told Reuters.

    A Turkish foreign ministry official said he was aware the flights
    had been cancelled but did not know the reason.

    Turkey has sought to ease Azerbaijan's concerns over previous
    reconciliation moves by Turkey and Armenia, who are locked in their
    own decades-old dispute over whether ethnic Armenians killed by Ottoman
    forces during World War One were victims of systematic genocide.

    Rapprochement efforts have alarmed Azerbaijan which first wants to
    resolve the Nagorno-Karabakh dispute.

    While Armenia's national carrier, Armavia, already operates flights to
    Istanbul and the coastal city of Antalya, the BoraJet flights would
    have been the first by a Turkish carrier to Armenia, and would have
    given Armenians easier access to an area of Turkey they refer to as
    their "historical homeland".

    Once home to hundreds of thousands of Armenians, eastern Turkey
    is scattered with ancient Armenian historic sites, including a
    newly-restored medieval church on the small island of Akdamar in Lake
    Van. The city of Van had large Armenian population prior to World
    War One.

    Hovhannisyan, who has been organising tours in eastern Turkey for
    years, said tourists currently had to travel by bus for up to 12
    hours via Georgia before starting their excursion.

    "A lot of tourists can't go, either for health problems or comfort
    reasons. This was the original idea: If we had a direct flight we
    would be able to circumvent those problems," he said.

    Hovhannisyan said they had written to the Turkish government asking
    them to reconsider their decision over the flights, which he said
    could also attract Turkish tourists to Armenia.

    "This is aimed at cooperation and peace. This is pure tourism. We
    don't want to have anything to do with politics."

    http://www.todayszaman.com/news-311415-turkey-scraps-flights-to-armenia-after-azeri-resistance.html



    From: Emil Lazarian | Ararat NewsPress
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