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  • No Signs Of Turkey-Armenia Thaw

    NO SIGNS OF TURKEY-ARMENIA THAW

    Institute for War and Peace Reporting, UK
    IWPR Caucasus Reporting #717
    Dec 25 2013

    Turkey now says Armenia must mend fences with its other neighbour
    Azerbaijan before rapprochement can happen.

    By Lamiya Adilgizi, Yekaterina Poghosyan - Caucasus

    If anyone was expecting Turkish foreign minister Ahmet Davutoglu's
    trip to Armenia - the first such high-level visit in five years -
    to herald an upturn in relations, they will have been disappointed.

    Neither side appears ready to give ground on the key issues.

    While in Yerevan on December 12 for a meeting of the Black Sea
    Economic Cooperation Organisation (BSEC), Davutoglu had a two-hour
    meeting with Armenia's foreign minister Eduard Nalbandyan.

    Davutoglu said Turkey wanted the relationship with Armenia to be as
    good as it was with other neighbours.

    He also said the unresolved conflicts in the Caucasus sapped energy
    that might be better spent on economic cooperation.

    "We would like Armenia to move past these frozen conflicts and to
    become part of our economic projects," he said.

    Although Davutoglu did not refer explicitly to Nagorny Karabakh,
    his remarks were read in Armenia as meaning that bilateral relations
    could not improve before that dispute was resolved.

    Karabakh has been controlled by an Armenian administration since the
    war of the early 1990s, but claims to independence remain unrecognised
    and the international community regards it as part of Azerbaijan.

    Mediation efforts have failed to make substantive progress towards
    a settlement since a 1994 truce ended open warfare between Armenian
    and Azerbaijani forces.

    Turkey, a close ally of post-independence Azerbaijan, closed its
    border with Armenia and broke off diplomatic relations during the
    war over Karabakh.

    The difficult relationship between Armenia and Turkey long pre-dates
    the Karabakh issue, however. The two countries are deeply divided on
    whether a genocide of Armenians occurred in Ottoman Turkey in 1915.

    Despite this difficult history, Ankara and Yerevan showed signs of
    seeking a rapprochement some years ago. In 2008, Turkish president
    Abdullah Gul paid an unprecedented visit to Armenia, and the following
    year, the two countries signed accords on restoring relations
    and opening the border. Neither country's parliament ratified the
    agreements, however, and the whole process ground to a halt.

    As long as it lasted, the thaw caused consternation and a sense of
    betrayal in Azerbaijan.

    Since then, the Turkish position seems to have shifted. Senior
    officials including Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan have said there
    will no progress as long as the Karabakh conflict remains unresolved.

    "Karabakh is not just Azerbaijan's problem but also Turkey's problem,"
    Erdogan said at a joint press conference with Azerbaijan's president
    Ilham Aliyev on November 13.

    Ankara was Aliyev's first foreign destination after he was re-elected
    as head of state in October.

    Rober KoptaĆ~_, an ethnic Armenian Turkish journalist who was part of
    the press corps that accompanied Davutoglu to Yerevan, said this now
    appeared to be an immovable policy - Ankara would not now take actions
    that might upset Azerbaijan. But he held out hope that progress in
    the two areas could take place in parallel.

    "If negotiations to resolve the Nagorny Karabakh conflict speed up
    [and] at least some progress is made there... Azerbaijan would be
    satisfied, and Turkey could go some way towards easing its tense
    relationship with Armenia," KoptaĆ~_, who is editor-in-chief of the
    Armenian-Turkish weekly Agos, told IWPR.

    In Yerevan, Ruben Safrastryan, director of Armenia's Oriental
    Institute, was less hopeful.

    "We are seeing Turkey continuing to link normalisation of
    Armenian-Turkish relations to the Nagorny Karabakh conflict," he said.

    "Davutoglu is using this visit as a primitive form of PR to create
    the illusion that Turkey wants to revive the normalisation process,
    when in reality we aren't seeing of the kind."

    Armenian officials were tight-lipped on the Davutoglu visit, but Giro
    Manoyan of the opposition Dashnaktsutyun party said Turkey was probably
    trying to project itself as a peacemaker as the 100th anniversary of
    the genocide approached.

    "It wasn't a Turkish minister visiting to Yerevan; he was just
    participating in the BSEC meeting in Yerevan. Turkey wishes to create
    the impression that you should expect something to come of Davutoglu's
    visit... but there's no reason to believe that. Turkey does not in
    fact want to normalise relations with Armenia; it's merely trying to
    create that impression," he told IWPR.

    In Azerbaijan, Leyla Aliyeva, head of the Centre for National and
    International Studies, said her country's increasing importance as
    a supplier of oil and gas to Turkey gave it ever more sway over that
    country's policy towards Armenia.

    "If the recent Turkish initiative covers the Nagorny Karabakh conflict,
    Azerbaijan will react positively; if it doesn't, then I doubt it,"
    she told IWPR.

    Lamiya Adilgizi is a correspondent for the Istanbul-based paper Today's
    Zaman. Yekaterina Poghosyan is a correspondent for Mediamax in Yerevan

    http://iwpr.net/report-news/no-signs-turkey-armenia-thaw


    From: Baghdasarian
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