Armenia: Turkey Protocols - UK press reports
From The Economist print edition
It may take a long time to restore relations between two old enemies
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AFTER decades of fierce animosity, are Turkey and Armenia getting closer to peace? This week the two countries announced plans for six weeks of “internal political consultations” before establishing diplomatic ties and reopening their border. Coming after several months of Swiss mediation and arm-twisting by America, the declaration makes reconciliation between Turkey and Armenia a real prospect—but not a foregone conclusion.
Hopes of a new friendship blossomed in September 2008 when Turkey’s president, Abdullah Gul, became the first modern Turkish leader to visit Armenia, for a football World Cup qualifier (which Armenia lost). A full deal seemed imminent in April when the two countries initialled a preliminary agreement, including a plan to reopen the border. This was sealed by the Turks in 1993 in solidarity with their Azeri cousins during Azerbaijan’s short, sharp war with Armenia over Nagorno-Karabakh, a mainly Armenian enclave of Azerbaijan (which Armenia won).
Turkey had earlier insisted that it would not reopen the border until Armenia and Azerbaijan had made peace. But in April it seemed to change tack. The main reason was to stop America’s Congress adopting a resolution to label the mass slaughter of the Ottoman Armenians in 1915 as genocide. It worked: Barack Obama did not use the term in his annual April 24th statement on the anniversary of the killings.
Yet days later the Turkish prime minister, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, reverted to previous policy by insisting that peace with Armenia would come only if the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict was solved. The switch back reflected nationalist reaction at home as well as Azerbaijan’s threat to turn towards Russia. Armenia’s president, Serzh Sargsyan, retaliated by saying he would not attend a return football match in Turkey on October 14th unless the border was on the verge of being reopened.
This week’s announcement is calculated to ensure that Mr Sargsyan comes to the match, maintaining the façade of reconciliation. By careful coincidence the time for internal political consultations ends just before the match. Links of various sorts between the two countries are growing fast and Armenian tourists have been flocking to the Turkish coast. Yet hostility to a deal from opposition parties in both countries is strong.
Armenia’s hardline nationalists are furious that the government has agreed both to the present border and to a joint historical commission that might yet call the genocide into doubt. They also accuse Mr Sargsyan of selling out Karabakh. Even if the April 22nd deal is accepted, another hurdle has been raised: both countries’ parliaments must agree. To stifle domestic anger (and perhaps embarrass the Turks) Armenia also chose to publish the full text of the agreements in April. They do not mention Nagorno-Karabakh.
Turkey’s response has been contradictory. Its foreign minister, Ahmet Davutoglu, insists that he hopes that the border will be reopened by the end of the year. But he also says that peace with Armenia is sustainable only if it makes peace with Azerbaijan. Long-running talks between Armenia and Azerbaijan seem to be going nowhere. Mr Davutoglu’s most accurate assertion may be that Turkey and Armenia are at the start of a “long process.” How long is anybody’s guess.
September 2, 2009
Bronwen Maddox, Chief Foreign Commentator
Turkey and Armenia sidestep 94-year-old massacre for tentative peace
It's taken only 94 years to make peace. It might have taken much longer.
The talks between Turkey and Armenia about whether they can manage something
like normal relations are probably more symbol than substance. But they
represent a gesture that might easily not have been made, particularly by
Turkey. They are an unexpected step towards calm from the tense borderlands
between Europe and Central Asia.
They will have an effect in the US, too, where the clash between Armenia and
Turkey has played to a nationwide, passionate audience, from Congress to the
singer Cher (who is Armenian). In Europe it might seem like a far-off
dispute; in the US it is intimate, eating up congressional debates and
national airtime.
Even in the European Union it will have an impact greater than this week's
tentative moves suggest. It will ease Turkey's relations with the EU after
several years of friction.
Yet the steps, so far, are small. On Monday the two said that they would
sign a pact within weeks to talk about resuming ties, although that hurdle
would need approval by both parliaments. If they get that far, it would end
nearly a century of animosity that stems from the killing of as many as 1.5
million Armenians under the Ottoman Empire in 1915, during the First World
War. Armenia calls it genocide and wants an admission and an apology. Turkey
maintains that many were killed on each side. There have not been diplomatic
ties, other than when Armenia was part of the Soviet Union. The border was
closed during the 1988-94 conflict over the Azerbaijani region of
Nagorno-Karabakh.
Now the border might open, possibly by the new year, officials on each side
suggest, although the greater impetus for a deal clearly comes from Armenia.
It is landlocked, and has an urgent need for trade. As its President, Serzh
Sargsyan, said yesterday: `Armenia initiated the possibility of normalising
relations' - adding, grandly but justifiably, that he had done so `with
dignity as it is appropriate to the civilised world of the 21st century'.
The agreement, brokered by Swiss officials and taking shape since April,
baldly leaves aside history, genocide or the frozen Nagorno-Karabakh dispute
(although Turkey insists progress on this front needs to happen in
parallel). This is what you might call constructive evasion. We should hope
that they manage at least to open the border. Allowing everyday contact
would be an antidote to the understandable difficulty in forgetting who
slaughtered whom a century ago.
It would also take the sting out of the repeated eruptions in American
politics over the issue, powered by the US's large Armenian community. Two
years ago, President Bush clashed with a Democrat-led House of
Representatives committee that denounced the 1915 deaths as genocide, even
though a phalanx of former secretaries of state warned about the impact on
relations with Turkey, a crucial ally. If Armenia and Turkey can be talked
down from the embrace of this old conflict, it is even possible that the US
Congress eventually can, too.
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