At a time when efforts to normalize their bilateral ties have been stalled for a number of reasons, the leaders of Armenia and Turkey agreed at a landmark meeting to continue these efforts despite visible difficulties ahead.
Armenian President Serzh Sarksyan and Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan held a rare bilateral meeting in Washington on Monday on the sidelines of a two-day nuclear security summit hosted by US President Barack Obama that started earlier on Monday at the Washington Convention Center. The two leaders had held another rare meeting in January 2009, when they both participated in an annual meeting of the World Economic Forum (WEF) held in the ski resort town of Davos, Switzerland.
The main item on the agenda of the almost one-and-a-half-hour-long meeting was a detailed exchange of views on a letter recently sent by Erdoğan to Sarksyan, well-informed sources said. The letter was sent via Feridun Sinirlioğlu, the Foreign Ministry undersecretary, who last week paid successive visits first to Yerevan and then to Baku as Erdoğan's special envoy.
It 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.
In addition to Armenian Foreign Minister Edward Nalbandian and his Turkish counterpart, Ahmet Davutoğlu, Armenian Presidential Administration Deputy Chief of Staff Vigen Sargsyan and Sinirlioğlu attended the meeting.
The Armenian and Turkish sides agreed to continue efforts to normalize their relations via contacts led by the foreign ministers of the two countries, the same well-informed sources said. Yet, there was no other statement on whether contentious issues regarding the process came on the agenda of the meeting and if they did, what the leaders said.
As an outcome of closed-door talks that had been held for more than a year through the mediation of Switzerland on ways to restore diplomatic relations and open their mutual border, Ankara and Yerevan announced almost a year ago, on April 22, 2009, that they had reached an agreement on a road map to normalize their relations.
Overcoming painful ups and downs -- particularly stemming from uneasiness over Azerbaijan -- the two countries took a landmark step in Zurich in October when Davutoğlu and Nalbandian signed two protocols to establish diplomatic ties and re-open their border.
However, the process hit a rocky patch in January after an Armenian court upheld the legality of the protocols but underlined that they could not contradict Yerevan’s official position that the alleged Armenian genocide must be internationally recognized. Turkey accused Yerevan of trying to set conditions on the deals. The process of normalization has also been crippled by Turkey’s insistence on parallel progress on the Nagorno-Karabakh territorial dispute between Armenia and Azerbaijan.
According to Turkish media reports, during the meeting, Erdoğan recalled that Turkey expects development in the resolution of the Nagorno-Karabakh dispute, while Sarksyan said Turkey could not impose this as a precondition. The Turkish side also expressed uneasiness over the Armenian-American diaspora’s intense lobbying efforts for official recognition of the alleged genocide, underlining that those efforts have been harmful to the efforts at normalization.
‘Language of conditions’
Despite the absence of a joint statement following their meeting, Armenian and Turkish leaders, in remarks delivered separately following the meeting, reiterated their well-known positions.
Speaking at George Mason University’s new Center for Global Islamic Studies in Fairfax, Virginia, Erdoğan criticized a long-running effort in the US Congress to pass a resolution declaring that Anatolian Armenians were victims of genocide nearly a century ago.
“We are against a one-sided interpretation of history,” Erdoğan said. “History cannot be written in parliament and judged by parliament.”
Turkey recalled its US ambassador last month in protest after the Committee on Foreign Affairs in the House of Representatives passed a resolution declaring that the Ottoman-era killings amounted to genocide. The full House has yet to vote on the resolution.
The venue for Sarksyan’s remarks was Washington National Cathedral as he laid a wreath at the tomb of US President Woodrow Wilson (1856-1924), known as the architect of the “Wilsonian Armenia,” the boundary for an Armenian state drawn up by Wilson for the Treaty of Sèvres, which was imposed on the Ottoman government by the victorious Western powers at the end of World War I.
“This morning I met with the prime minister of Turkey. Our position has been and remains very straightforward. Turkey cannot speak with Armenia and the Armenian people in the language of conditions. We will simply not allow that. We are not preparing in any way to question the fact of the Armenian Genocide, or to pretend that we believe that Turkey can play any diplomatic role in the process of finding a solution to the problem of Nagorno-Karabakh,” Sarksyan was quoted as saying by Armenian media as he spoke to members of the Armenian community there.
“Any new foreign policy is subject to temptations because we are walking down a path no one has walked before. I am confident Armenia will pass this exam with honor,” Sarksyan also said in remarks delivered in Armenian.
Later on Monday, Sarksyan held a bilateral meeting with Obama, who has urged Armenia and Turkey to “make every effort” to advance the normalization of relations between their two countries.
“The president commended President Sarksyan for his courageous efforts to achieve normalization of relations between Armenia and Turkey and encouraged him to fulfill the promise of normalization for the benefit of the Armenian people,” the White House said in a statement after the meeting. “President Obama also urged that both Armenia and Turkey make every effort to advance the normalization process and achieve legislative ratification of the protocols of normalization,” it said, adding that Obama voiced his support for Armenian democracy.
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