Armenia’s ruling coalition on Thursday said it had decided to freeze the process of parliamentary ratification of accords with Turkey aimed at normalizing ties between the historic foes. “The Turkish side's refusal to fulfill the requirement to ratify the accord without preconditions in a reasonable time has made the continuation of the ratification process in the national parliament pointless,” the coalition said in a statement.
“We consider it necessary to suspend this process until Turkey is ready to continue the process without preconditions,” the statement said. The move, which came only two days before US President Barack Obama is to issue his annual April 24 statement to commemorate the Armenians that perished in Ottoman Anatolia in the beginning of the last century, is seen as a maneuver to force Obama to use the word "genocide" this year.
Obama says he is personally convinced that the killings constituted genocide — a claim Turkey firmly denies — but has never used the g-word since he became president, saying he does not want to harm Turkish-Armenian normalization efforts. The ruling party’s statement is unlikely to have any practical effect on the process since two protocols signed by the two countries’ foreign ministers in October are already waiting in both national parliaments for ratification at an unspecified date.
In Ankara, Turkish officials were cautious. “How to run the normalization process is an affair we will decide upon,” Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoðan told reporters in Ankara. Erdoðan has said repeatedly that the Turkish-Armenian normalization process was unlikely to succeed without an Armenian withdrawal from Azerbaijani territory that has been occupied by Armenian forces since the early 1990s and the war over Nagorno-Karabakh.
“The political majority in the national assembly considers statements from the Turkish side in recent days as unacceptable, specifically those by Prime Minister Erdoðan, who has again made the ratification of the Armenia-Turkish protocols by the Turkish parliament directly dependent on a resolution over Nagorno-Karabakh,” the statement from the Armenian ruling coalition said.
Recalling that he recently sent a message to Armenian President Serzh Sarksyan, Erdoðan said in his letter he underlined “the importance attached by the Turkish government to the principle of pacta sunt servanda [a principle of international law which means in Latin that agreements must be kept] and its commitment to the continuation of the process.”
He also reiterated that the Turkish government was also determined for the maintenance of “a comprehensive regional peace.”
When asked whether he expected the statement to have an impact on Obama’s April 24 message, Erdoðan said he doesn’t believe any statement has the power to have an impact on any leader, particularly the president of the United States.
Ankara has approached the news coming from Yerevan cautiously and calmly, with governmental officials speaking on condition of anonymity indicating that they consider the move a “tactical” one on the eve of April 24.
While Foreign Ministry officials said Turkey had not received any official information about the suspension of the protocols’ ratification, the ministry spokesperson made a brief statement on the issue.
Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoðlu, who was in Tallinn attending a NATO ministerial meeting, called Erdoðan upon learning about the statement, spokesman Burak Özügergin, who accompanied the minister, told the Anatolia news agency.
“We are making an analysis of how this move should be read, what meaning it has and its content. We are assessing what steps could be taken,” Özügergin added.
Sarksyan, who faces resistance from opponents at home and the huge Armenian diaspora abroad, was due to make a statement on national television later on Thursday.
According to Güner Özkan of the Ankara-based International Strategic Research Organization (USAK), the timing of the Armenian statement timing is “rather meaningful.”
“Via freezing the process, they want show the world and Obama that Turkey is guilty of the slowing down in the process. Their message is sent to Obama on the eve of April 24 and says that he should not trust Turkey concerning its determination and sincerity vis-à-vis the normalization process,” Özkan, an expert on the Caucasus region, told Today’s Zaman, while noting that the statement must have also been satisfying for the diaspora, who “considers the normalization process as the biggest hurdle” in front of official US recognition of alleged genocide.
Yet, Özkan underlined he didn’t expect this statement to be a determining factor on the content of Obama’s April 24 message, as he believed that the US president would refrain from using the g-word.
In Washington, meanwhile, the Armenian diaspora intensified its activities ahead of April 24, as an annual congressional commemoration for the alleged genocide was held on Wednesday with the participation of US Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi.
“We are tired of the story being told [about why Congress should not adopt an Armenian genocide resolution], but we are not tired of fighting for the truth,” Pelosi was quoted as saying by English-language news portal The Armenian Reporter, as she addressed some 200 people, mostly Armenian-Americans.
“Pelosi added that she and other supporters of affirmation would not rest until the federal government clearly recognizes the Armenian genocide, but she made no commitments about bringing the House resolution to vote, a move that is opposed by the Obama administration,” the news portal said.
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