Category: 2022

Turkey and Armenia held talks in Moscow, Russia, on Friday. The two countries are seeking to normalize relations and reopen borders.

Turkey and Armenia have not been linked diplomatically or commercially for the past three decades. This is the first attempt to rebuild relations since a failed peace accord in 2009.

The nations’ relationship has been historically strained over a number of issues, most significantly the 1915 Armenian genocide which caused the death of 1.5 million Armenians at the hand of the Ottoman Empire.

Despite the massive loss of life that occurred, Turkey still does not acknowledge these 1915 killings as a genocide, but rather admits that Armenians living in the Ottoman Empire died at the hands of Ottoman forces.

The Greek genocide, which included the Pontic genocide instigated by the Ottoman Empire and the Turkish national movement, is one of the darkest chapters in all of Greece’s long history.

An organized plan to eliminate the indigenous Greek population of Asia Minor, it included massacres, forced deportations involving death marches, expulsions, executions, and the wholesale destruction of Eastern Orthodox cultural, historical, and religious monuments.

The Turks feared that the Greek-speaking Christian population would welcome liberation by the Ottoman Empire’s enemies.

At the same time, the nationalist Turks believed in the creation of a modern nation without strong, influential ethnic and religious minorities; this was one of the main factors that led to the Greek genocide.

At the outbreak of World War I, there were many minorities that had been living in Asia Minor long before the creation of the Ottoman Empire, including Greeks, Pontic Greeks, Caucasus Greeks, Cappadocian Greeks, Armenians, Kurds, Assyrians, Jews, and others.

The Ottoman Empire was in rapid decline, headed by the Committee of Union and Progress (“CUP”). The CUP were, among other things, proponents of Turkish nationalism.

When the Ottomans joined the Central Powers of Germany and Austria-Hungary in 1914, the stage was set for the first genocide of the twentieth century.

Using Christian rebels colluding with the Russian Army as a pretext, the Ottoman government announced a policy of property confiscation and deportations against the Christian minorities of the empire — first among them being the Armenians.

The extermination of the Armenian population in 1915 was the first atrocity paving the way for the Greek genocide that culminated in 1923, after the Burning of Smyrna.

Most historians date the final decision to exterminate the Armenian population to the end of March or early April in 1915.

Turkish Minister of War Enver Pasha took over command of the Ottoman armies for the invasion of Russian territory and tried to encircle the Russian Caucasus Army at the Battle of Sarikamish, which took place from December 1914 to January 1915.

Today in Moscow, Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Andrei Rudenko held separate meetings with Armenian and Turkish special envoys Ruben Rubinyan and Serdar Kilic on the normalization of bilateral relations. There was a direct contact between the special envoys of Armenia and Turkey. Smolenskaya Square reports that the parties have demonstrated their readiness to conduct the dialogue in a constructive, non-politicized manner, in a spirit of openness and practical results, taking “small steps” from simple to complex. It was agreed to continue the search for a common ground in the interests of the peoples of the two countries, in the interests of regional stability and economic progress.

The success of the talks that began in Moscow on Friday to normalize relations between Armenia and Turkey can be measured in the remote village of Margara. Bloomberg writes.

Its 1,500 Armenian residents left Turkey shortly after the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 with a narrow bridge over the Arakh River that had been barbed wire for decades. Attempts by long-time enemies to overcome more than a century of hostility and open the border create mixed emotions.

Arusyak Muradyan, 59, who runs Margara’s school, said: “It’s a positive thing. We can’t stay in isolation forever.” Anahit Sagatelyan, 41, who runs a shop in the village, said he was against opening the border. “People say it’s going to be good for trade, but I don’t believe it,” he said. “We won’t be useful.”

Jambul Gasparyan, 60, had a phlegmatic look at the talks with Turkey. “They are our enemies,” he said. “We don’t like the idea of opening borders, but it will increase trade and ordinary people will benefit from it.”

The catalyst for the attempt to establish diplomatic relations was Armenia’s defeat in 2020 in neighboring Azerbaijan in the war for the long-disputed Nagorno-Karabakh enclave. Turkey, which sealed the border with Azerbaijan in 1993, provided military support to its ally in the war and claims that Baku’s victory means that the conflict no longer hinders negotiations with Armenia.

The agreement to strengthen ties and open borders will help bring stability to the often volatile Caucasus region, an important crossroads for energy pipelines from the Caspian region and Central Asia to Europe, bypassing Russia. It is also presented as a transport corridor for goods between Europe and China.

The bitter legacy of the massacre of 1.5 million Armenians in the former Ottoman Empire in 1915, a characteristic that the United States, Russia, France and many other nations recognize as genocide and rejected by Turkey, will not be on the agenda. Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan said at a press conference on December 24 that the recognition of the genocide was “never a precondition for the normalization of relations with Turkey.”

Foreign Ministry spokesman Vahan Hunanyan said on Thursday that Armenia is waiting for the start of the process, which will lead to the establishment of diplomatic relations and the opening of borders with Turkey, hosted by Russia.

Again, both sides have been here before. When Armenia and Turkey met in the qualifiers for the 2009 FIFA World Cup, an attempt at “football diplomacy” prompted the then-Turkish president to travel to Yerevan to watch the match with his Armenian counterpart, who was visiting Turkey.

However, in 2010 the initiative failed because the parties failed to ratify the US-backed roadmap for building ties and opening the border.

Richard Giragosyan, director of the Center for Regional Studies, an analytical center in Yerevan, said that landlocked Armenia is now continuing relations with its larger neighbor to “break out of isolation” from the Jovid-19 pandemic, which threatens economic recovery. “The second factor stems from the new post-war reality and the process of restoring regional trade and transport links in the Caucasus,” he said.

Although Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan “will not gain significant political points or economic gains in the short term from the initiative, the successful process will improve Turkey’s access to Central Asian markets and increase regional trade and investment,” said European Director Emre Peker. For the Eurasian Group.