TURKEY STEPS UP EFFORTS TO REBUILD ARMENIA RELATIONS
By Toby Vogel
European Voice
d/turkey-steps-up-efforts-to-rebuild-armenia-relat ions/64817.aspx
May 7 2009
A roadmap for restoring relations between Armenia and Turkey could
fundamentally change political alignments in the Caucasus region.
On 22 April, the foreign ministries of Turkey, Armenia and Switzerland
issued a joint statement consisting of just four sentences. It said
that with the help of Swiss mediators, Turkey and Armenia had agreed
a "comprehensive framework" for restoring relations and drawn up
"a roadmap" to guide the process. That short statement held out
the promise of a fundamental realignment of political forces in the
south Caucasus.
The roadmap was the product of two years of secret diplomacy. Its
contents have not been made public, but a first step foresees the
restoration of diplomatic relations between Turkey and Armenia. A
second step would be to open the border, ending an isolation that
has driven landlocked Armenia into Russia’s embrace. In a third
step, a joint commission of historians would look into the events
of 1915, when the Ottoman authorities rounded up more than a million
Armenians. Hundreds of thousands were killed or died on forced marches
into the Syrian desert.
A rapprochement between the two countries had been expected since
last September, when Abdullah Gul, Turkey’s president and a leading
figure in the ruling Justice and Development party (AKP), visited
Armenia’s capital Yerevan – the first-ever visit by a Turkish leader
to the country.
"Swiss diplomacy has been crucial," says Sinan Ulgen, chairman of the
Centre for Economics and Foreign Policy Studies in Istanbul. "This
has been one of the surprises."
Relations between the two countries soured in 2007, when a Swiss court
found a Turkish politician guilty of denying that the Armenians were
victims of a genocide in 1915.
Turkey still refuses to acknowledge the genocide, saying instead that
more historical research is needed. Agreeing to set up a committee to
study the matter is therefore a major concession by Armenia. It has
argued that current historical knowledge is sufficient to determine
that a genocide took place – a view with which most foreign scholars
agree.
The joint statement was issued just ahead of 24 April, which is
commemorated by Armenians around the world as the day when their
suffering began in 1915, with the arrest of community leaders by the
Ottoman authorities.
Genocide dilemma The genocide question is of huge symbolic importance
to all Armenians. The shared memory of the massacres of 1915-17 is a
defining feature of Armenian national identity. But it is the status
of Nagorno-Karabakh – an Armenian enclave inside Turkic-speaking
Azerbaijan – that has the most immediate implications for regional
stability and for the existing web of alliances in the south Caucasus.
The Turkish-Armenian border has been closed since the early 1990s,
when Turkey imposed a blockade on Armenia in retaliation for Armenian
gains in a war with Turkey’s ally Azerbaijan. Armenia occupied not
only Nagorno-Karabakh but also a land-bridge linking it to Armenia,
and large swathes of other territory inside Azerbaijan.
Predictably, Azerbaijan’s reaction to the Turkish-Armenian
rapprochement has been negative: it fears that any normalisation
will remove the main incentive for Armenia to withdraw from occupied
territory.
The absence of explicit references to Nagorno-Karabakh has heightened
Azeri suspicions of being sold out by their Turkish protector. The
Azeri reaction and a possible nationalist backlash once the roadmap is
debated in Turkey’s parliament might yet lead to such a reference being
inserted in the final text. This will not be easy, as Serzh Sargsyan,
the president of Armenia, has also come in for nationalist criticism.
But acknowledged or not, there is at least a ‘soft link’ between
Turkish-Armenian rapprochement and any future solution to the
Nagorno-Karabakh problem, according to Ulgen. The two processes need
to go in parallel; otherwise, the risk of failure is too high.
Energy game Relations between Turkey and Azerbaijan are already
difficult because Turkey wants to act as a middleman rather than
merely a transit country in the sale of Azeri gas to the EU through
the planned Nabucco pipeline. This has prompted Ilham Aliyev, the
president of Azerbaijan, to consider selling the gas to Russia instead,
via existing trans-Caucasian pipelines, as a back-up option if Nabucco
fails to materialise.
The rapprochement with Armenia is part of a broader Turkish strategy
to establish friendly relations with all of its neighbours, according
to Ulgen. The chief architect of the strategy, Ahmet Davutoglu –
a professor of international relations who had been serving as
Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s foreign policy adviser
– was named foreign minister last Friday (1 May). This is a clear
sign that Erdogan is determined to continue pushing for peace with
Turkey’s neighbours.