At a time when the normalization process between Armenia and Turkey have come to a standstill, Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan has been planning to pay a visit to the two countries’ neighbor, Azerbaijan.
Erdoğan disclosed his plans for visiting Baku during an informal question-and-answer session with reporters on Tuesday night outside Parliament’s General Assembly Hall during ongoing intense debates on a constitutional reform package. The prime minister didn’t elaborate on a date for his visit, yet it is expected to be after debates and voting over the reform package are finalized, which means within days. Erdoğan is already scheduled to pay an official visit to Athens on May 14-15, and sources said a Baku visit is likely to take place just after the Greece visit, probably on May 17. However, the same sources highlighted that no exact date has been set.
Most recently, Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoğlu voiced Turkey’s insistence on parallel progress on the normalization process with Armenia and on the Nagorno-Karabakh territorial dispute between Armenia and Azerbaijan.
Delivering a keynote lecture on Saturday at the University of Oxford’s St. Antony’s College, Davutoğlu touched upon the recent course of affairs regarding the stalled normalization process between Armenia and Turkey.
“For sure, we want to open our border because we want full integration with our neighbors. However, opening the Turkey-Armenia border will not be sufficient; we want to open the Armenia-Azerbaijan border as well so that regional stability can be maintained,” Davutoğlu said.
Last October, Davutoğlu and his Armenian counterpart, Edward Nalbandian, signed two protocols for restoring diplomatic ties between their countries and re-opening the two countries’ joint border, but they have yet to be ratified in the national parliaments -- a necessary condition for their implementation -- amid mutual accusations of belatedly added preconditions. Turkey says a decision by the Constitutional Court of Armenia on the protocols interprets them in a way that misrepresents their objectives. Armenia, on the other hand, says Turkey has linked the process to the Nagorno-Karabakh dispute between Armenia and Azerbaijan although this goes against the text of the protocols.
“The Turkish-Armenian borders could be opened in the first stage only under the conditions of withdrawal of Armenian troops from five occupied regions of Azerbaijan and the Lachin corridor. It will create conditions for Turkish-Armenian cooperation as well as trilateral trade relations between Turkey, Azerbaijan and Armenia. Rejecting all these conditions, Armenia lost everything. Armenia can lose good prospects because of the political views of President [Serzh] Sarksyan or anyone else,” Azerbaijani Deputy Foreign Minister Araz Azimov, who is also a special representative of Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev for the settlement of Nagorno-Karabakh, said earlier this week.
While speaking about a bilateral meeting with Sarksyan, which was held in Washington in early April, Erdoğan later that month said: “We underlined the fact that relations between Armenia and Azerbaijan and reaching a resolution over rayons [administrative units greater than a district but smaller than a province which surround the Nagorno-Karabakh region] will be determining factors in implementing the protocols.”
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