COMMENTS OF THE SPEAKER OF ARMENIA’S NATIONAL ASSEMBLY
08/31/05 16:08 EDT
WASHINGTON (AP) – The speaker of Armenia’s National Assembly said
Wednesday he supports neighboring Turkey’s application to join the
European Union and suggested the eventual accession to the EU of
other countries in the south Caucasus region.
“What’s wrong with having a neighboring country a member of the
EU?” Artur Baghdasaryan replied when asked about Turkey’s possible
entry into the 25-nation organization. Baghdasaryan, leader of
the center-right Orinats Yerkir (Country of Law) party in Armenia’s
governing coalition, said that if Turkey can comply with EU standards
and join the EU, then other countries of the region should seek
accession.
“I see the future of our region in an expanded EU,” he said at
a meeting of the Center for Strategic and International Studies,
a policy research group.
Baghdasaryan was in Washington for talks with State Department
officials, the U.S. Agency for International Development and the
Millennium Challenge Account, a Bush administration aid program for
which Armenia was among the first group of qualifying countries.
He also said Turkey and Armenia, which do not have diplomatic
relations, should “not set barriers to cooperation but sit down and
talk, not avoiding past problems but moving forward with constant
dialogue.”
The Turks and Armenians have been at odds for decades over the deaths
of hundreds of thousands of Armenians at the time of World War I.
Armenians say the Ottoman Turks caused the deaths of 1.5 million
Armenians in a planned genocide and have demanded that Turkey recognize
the killings as genocide.
Turkey says the death toll is wildly inflated. Many Turks fear that
Armenia is pressing for recognition of the killings as genocide as
a step toward making territorial claims against Turkey.
“The slaughter cannot be forgotten,” Baghdasaryan said. “That would
not be correct.” He contended that the Holocaust occurred because
Adolf Hitler reasoned the international community had ignored the
genocide of the Armenians.
On another foreign policy issue, he welcomed weekend talks between the
presidents of Armenia and neighboring Azerbaijan over the disputed
Nagorno-Karabakh enclave. Baghdasaryan said a resolution to the
decade-old dispute would open the way to increased regional cooperation
with the objective of turning the south Caucasus into a unified market.
“There has to be compromise on both sides and a solution acceptable
to both sides,” he said.
Tension between Armenia and Azerbaijan remains high more than
a decade after a 1994 cease-fire ended a six-year war that left
Nagorno-Karabakh, a mostly ethnic Armenian enclave within Azerbaijan,
in Armenian hands.
Some 30,000 people were killed and a million displaced, and the
lack of resolution of the enclave’s status has impeded the region’s
development.