Armenia said it is abandoning a US-backed agreement with Turkey to reopen the border between the two countries, until Ankara drops preconditions and ratifies the deal.
In a televised statement to the nation, Armenian President Serzh Sargsyan accused Ankara of stalling ratification of the agreement, which was signed in October. He said Turkey was treating the process as “an end in itself,” whose main goal was to prevent the US from acknowledging the Ottoman Empire’s 1915 massacre of Armenians as genocide. “For a whole year, Turkey has done everything to protract time and fail the process,” said Mr. Sargsyan. “Reasonable time frames have, in our opinion, elapsed. The Turkish practice of passing the 24th of April at any cost is simply unacceptable.” The Armenian decision came just days before President Barack Obama is due to make the White House’s annual statement on the April 24 anniversary of the massacres.
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