Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan has said he does not expect his meeting with US President Barack Obama today to be marred by tension over a congressional vote last month to recognize Armenian claims of genocide at the hands of the Ottoman Empire.
Erdoğan was speaking to a group of journalists late on Sunday on board a plane en route from İstanbul to Washington. “Our meetings with Obama do not start with tension,” he said in response to a question. Erdoğan was to participate in a two-day nuclear security summit hosted by Obama that started at the White House on Monday. Turkey's ambassador to the US, Namık Tan, returned to Washington last week after being recalled to Ankara in March in protest of a vote by the US House of Representatives Committee on Foreign Affairs, which passed a resolution declaring the killings genocide. Yet it is unclear whether the full House will vote on it.
Tan said on Friday that he came back after assurances from the Obama administration that it would oppose the congressional action and not itself label the killings genocide. “We have received some satisfactory messages. I hope there will be a new chapter,” he said.
When reminded of the issue and asked whether it would lead to tension during his meeting with Obama, Erdoğan suggested the tension had already been resolved. “We haven’t brought it here,” he said.
On Monday, both Erdoğan and Obama were scheduled to have separate meetings with Armenian President Serzh Sarksyan. As he did ahead of his departure from İstanbul, Erdoğan emphasized that the Minsk Group of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) has a responsibility for making a contribution to normalization efforts between Armenia and Turkey. The Minsk Group, the three co-chairs of which are from France, Russia and the US, has striven to resolve the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict, a territorial dispute between Baku and Yerevan, for more than 17 years.
Recalling that Ambassador Feridun Sinirlioğlu, the Foreign Ministry undersecretary, last week paid consecutive visits first to Yerevan and then Baku as his special envoy, Erdoğan noted that he had sent a letter to Sarksyan via Sinirlioğlu. The letter contained a message that an agreement would better serve the interests of the two countries, especially when compared to the cost of the failure to achieve peace.
“We don’t impose our memories on anyone else. We said [in the letter] nobody should impose its memories on us, either,” Erdoğan said, in an apparent reference to the legacy of the World War I killings of Anatolian Armenians under the Ottoman Empire.
Armenia and Turkey signed accords in Zurich in October of last year designed to overcome this legacy. “We stated [in the letter] that we would continue doing whatever our signature [on the accords] requires. What is important here is the developments that will take place in the process assumed by the Minsk Group,” Erdoğan continued.
Under the accords, Armenia and Turkey agreed to establish diplomatic ties and open their common border within two months of parliamentary approval. The deal would bring big economic gains to poor, landlocked Armenia. Turkey would burnish its credentials as a potential EU entry state and boost its clout in the south Caucasus, a region crisscrossed by pipelines carrying oil and gas to the West.
Reiterating that Turkey had discussed the issue earlier with Obama and Russian President Dmitry Medvedev as well as with US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov, Erdoğan referred to his meeting with French President Nicolas Sarkozy during an official visit to Paris last week.
“I told Sarkozy that opening the border [with Armenia] was no big deal. I proposed that he either take a car or the train and then we can pass through the border together as soon as the Minsk Group fulfills its duty,” he said.
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