Starting Points: Nagorno-Karabakh

Oct 11, 2009

VOA News - After Accord Signing, Turkey Presses Armenia on Nagorno-Karabakh

Turkey's prime minister says Armenia needs to withdraw its troops from a breakway enclave in Azerbaijan before Turkey will open its border with Armenia.

Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan linked the issues Sunday, one day after Turkey and Armenia signed an agreement to normalize relations after a century of hostility.

In Ankara, Mr. Erdogan said an Armenian troop pullout from Nagorno-Karabakh would ease the way for Turkey's parliament to ratify the deal on normalizing relations. Before the agreement can take effect, it must be ratified by the parliaments of both Turkey and Armenia.

Turkey shut its border with Armenia in 1993 in support of Azerbaijan, which was fighting to keep control of the Armenian-majority enclave of Nagorno-Karabakh.

Broader differences between Turkey and Armenia stem from the mass killing of Armenians by Ottoman Turkish forces during and after World War One.

The chairman of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, Greek Prime Minister George Papandreou, Sunday welcomed the Turkey-Armenia accord signed Saturday. He commended the effort and political will that leaders of the two countries have invested to overcome differences.

U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton spent several hours Saturday working to resolve a last-minute dispute over statements to be made at the signing ceremony in the Swiss city of Zurich. In the end, neither Armenian Foreign Minister Edward Nalbandian nor his Turkish counterpart, Ahmet Davutoglu, spoke after signing the protocols to establish diplomatic ties and to reopen the border.

There is strong opposition to the deal in both countries.

Armenians want the massacres between 1915 and 1923 recognized as genocide, and many countries have done so. Turkey strongly rejects the genocide claim. It says the Armenian death toll is inflated and that many Turks also were killed during the collapse of the Ottoman Empire.

The agreement calls for a joint commission of independent historians to examine the genocide question. Some experts say the commission would be a concession to Turkey as it would revisit an issue Armenia says has already been confirmed.

Sep 1, 2009

Turkey and Armenia to Establish Diplomatic Ties - NYTimes.com

By SEBNEM ARSU

ISTANBUL — Turkey and Armenia, whose century of hostilities constitutes one of the world’s most enduring and acrimonious international rivalries, have agreed to establish diplomatic relations, the two countries announced Monday.

In a breakthrough that came after a year of tiny steps across a still-sealed border and furtive bilateral talks in Switzerland, the foreign ministries of the two countries said that they would begin talks aimed at producing a formal agreement.

The joint statement said they had agreed “to start political negotiations” but did not touch on when or how some of their more intractable disputes would be addressed, starting with the killing of more than a million Armenians by the Ottoman Turk government from 1915 to 1918, which the Turkish government has denied was genocide.

The two countries have never had diplomatic relations, and their border has been closed since 1993, when Armenia and Azerbaijan, both former Soviet republics, went to war over the enclave of Nagorno-Karabakh. At the border, soldiers of Turkey, a NATO country, face Russian ones, called in by Armenia, across a mini-Iron Curtain.

Turkey supported Azerbaijan in the dispute, but Russia’s military action in Georgia last year shifted the security calculus in the region. After the war in Georgia, Turkey sought to improve ties with its neighbors in the Caucasus, and Armenia elected a new government interested in reciprocating.

Both countries hope an eventual opening of the border will benefit their struggling economies. Currently, there are limited charter flights between the countries but no real trade.

For Turkey, better relations with Armenia could improve its chances for admission to the European Union, where the genocide issue remains one of the main obstacles, and remove a bone of contention over the same issue with the United States, which has a large Armenian community.

The Swiss-mediated talks began last year, keeping a low profile to avoid exciting nationalist antagonism in both countries. Armenia’s insistence that border and trade relations be normalized before any discussion of genocide began helped push the most contentious issue to the back burner.

Last September, President Abdullah Gul of Turkey attended a Turkey-Armenia soccer match in Yerevan, the Armenian capital, the first visit by a Turkish leader in the two nations’ history.

The symbolic gesture, dubbed soccer diplomacy, was widely opposed in both countries, where bitter ethnic enmity commands large majorities.

The central dispute is the genocide, about which there is little dispute among historians. Turkey has resisted the label, arguing that the Armenians were killed in warfare.

The next round of talks is scheduled to last six weeks, ending about the time of a World Cup match between Turkey and Armenia in Istanbul. President Serge Sargsyan of Armenia is invited to attend.