OcOb 2010
Armenia and urkey:bridging the Gap
HOMAS D WAAL
Senior Associate, Russia and Eurasia ProgramENDOWMENT FOR INTERNATIONAL PEACE
POLICY BRIEF
87
C
ARNEGIE
Sury
The historic normalization between Armenia and Turkey has stalled and it is critical toprevent relations from deteriorating further.
If Armenia and Turkey eventually succeed in opening their closed border, it willtransform the South Caucasus region. But the concerns of Azerbaijan, Turkey’s ally andthe losing side in the Nagorny Karabakh conict, need to be taken into account. Theinternational community needs to pay more attention to the conict and work harderto break the regional deadlock it has generated.
The annual debate over the use of the word
genocide
to describe the fate of theOttoman Armenians in 1915 has turned into an ugly bargaining process. It is timeto take a longer view. President Obama should look ahead to the centenary of thetragedy in 2015 and encourage Turks to take part in commemorating the occasion.
2
CARNEGIE POLICY BRIEF
H AMNIA–UKYPOOcOLS
In October 2009, Armenia and Turkey begana historic rapprochement, signing two proto-cols on normalizing their relations that showedthem a way to escape their tragic past. In April2010, the process stalled, as the Turkish gov-ernment proved reluctant to submit the proto-cols for ratication by its parliament.e Armenia–Turkey normalization process was the most positive initiative in the SouthCaucasus for many years, and if carried throughit still has the potential to transform the region.ere is a chance that it can be revived afterTurkey’s general election, which is due in theearly summer of 2011. It is important for allinterested parties to work to keep this prospectalive. at requires robust support for non-political Track II Armenian–Turkish initia-tives that widen the constituency of Armeniansand Turks interested in rapprochement. It alsorequires expending greater eort on the resolu-tion of the unresolved Armenian–Azerbaijaniconict over Nagorny Karabakh, which was themain reason why the process ground to a halt.If the process is to get back on track, allinvolved parties, including the United States,should set their sights on longer-term goalsseveral years hence and “make haste slowly”toward them. e centenary of the Armeniantragedy in 2015 is a good reference point by which to set the goal of full Armenian–Turkishnormalization.
A AGIc HISOY
e Republic of Armenia has been an inde-pendent state since the collapse of the SovietUnion in 1991, but the border with neighbor-ing Turkey has been closed for most of thattime, and suspicions between Armenians andTurks are still strong. Armenian–Turkish relations live under theshadow of the mass deportation and killing of the Armenian population of Eastern Anatoliaby the Ottoman Young Turk regime in the yearsfollowing 1915. e allied powers at the timecalled the killings “crimes against humanity andcivilization,” and many historians agree thatmore than one million Armenians died. For the Armenian diaspora, most of whom are grand-children of surviving Anatolian Armenians, thistragedy denes their identity. Since the 1960sthey have lobbied internationally for the kill-ings to be termed a genocide. e governmentof modern Turkey, the successor state to theOttoman Empire, consistently denies that there was a genocidal policy toward the Armeniansand points out that hundreds of thousands of Ottoman Muslims died during the same period.Turkey recognized the newly independentRepublic of Armenia in 1991, but did not estab-lish diplomatic relations. Bilateral ties quickly became captive to Armenia’s escalating war with Ankara’s new ally Azerbaijan over the disputedterritory of Nagorny Karabakh. In April 1993, Armenian forces extended their military cam-paign outside Karabakh itself, capturing the Azerbaijani province of Kelbajar. Turkey closedits border with Armenia in protest; seventeenyears later, the border remains closed.In Turkey, attitudes toward the country’sneighbors and minorities have changed in theeight years since the election into governmentof the mildly Islamist AKP party in 2002. etaboo about discussing the Armenian issuehas been lifted—although some of the brav-est voices on this issue have sometimes paid ahigh price. Armenian tourists now visit Turkey in large numbers, and there are weekly ightsbetween Yerevan and Istanbul. Fethiye Çetin’smemoir,
My Grandmother,
published in 2004,confronted Turks with the long-suppressed factthat hundreds of thousands of Turkish citizenshad Armenian grandparents who were forc-ibly assimilated after 1915. Celebrated authorOrhan Pamuk challenged his countrymen tobreak their silence on the fate of the Ottoman Armenians. e Istanbul editor Hrant Dink—an ethnic Armenian and Turkish citizen—played a key role in initiating Armenian–Turkish dialogue. Dink’s assassination in 2007by a seventeen-year-old nationalist fanatic
Thomas de Waal
is a senior associate in the Russia and EurasiaProgram at the CarnegieEndowment, specializing primarily in the South Caucasusregion comprising Armenia, Azerbaijan, and Georgia and their breakaway territories, as well asthe wider Black Sea region.De Waal is an acknowledged expert on the unresolved confictso the South Caucasus: Abkhazia,Nagorny Karabakh, and SouthOssetia. From 2002 to 2009 heworked as an analyst and project manager on the conficts in theSouth Caucasus or the London-based NGOs ConciliationResources and the Institute or War and Peace Reporting.He is author o the authorita-tive book on the Karabakhconfict,
Black Garden: Armenia andAzerbaijan Through Peace and War
(NYU Press, 2003), which has beentranslated into Armenian, Azeri,and Russian. His new book,
TheCaucasus: An Introduction
(Oxord University Press), was released inSeptember 2010.
AbOU H AUHO
ARMENIA AND TRKEY: BRIDGING TE GAP3
triggered grief and outrage. At his funeral tensof thousands of mourners walked the streets of Istanbul, some chanting, “We are all Armenians.” Around the same time, at the request of both sides, the Swiss foreign ministry beganto chair condential talks between Armenianand Turkish diplomats. In September 2008,the process moved to a new level when TurkishPresident Abdullah Gül accepted the invitationof his Armenian counterpart, Serzh Sarkisian, toan Armenia–Turkey soccer match in Yerevan.For Turkey’s governing AK Party, holding outan olive branch to Armenia t within the new“zero problems with neighbors” policy devisedby its chief foreign policy strategist, AhmetDavutoğlu, who is now Turkey’s foreign minis-ter. Armenian President Serzh Sarkisian also sawan opening. His legitimacy had been damagedby the violence that accompanied his election inFebruary–March 2008, and his courageous deci-sion to invite Gül to Yerevan opened a new creditline of international support. e Armenian andTurkish foreign ministers eventually signed twoprotocols on normalizing their relations at aceremony in Zurich on October 10, 2009, sup-ported by, among others, U.S. Secretary of StateHillary Clinton. Both sides gave themselvesextra room to maneuver by requiring their par-liaments to ratify the Zurich protocols. e doc-uments stipulated that diplomatic relations mustbe established and the Armenia–Turkey borderopened within two months of ratication.
OPPOUNIIS AND PObLMS
e Zurich Protocols opened up hopeful vistasfor both countries. For Armenia they promisedan end to regional isolation and long-term eco-nomic transformation. Even with the borderclosed, Turkey is Armenia’s fth largest tradingpartner via Georgia, with an annual trade turn-over of more than $200 million. e country manager of the World Bank in Armenia, Aris-tomene Varoudakis, cites gures predicting that when the border with Turkey re-opens, importedgoods will be cheaper and their volume willincrease by 13 percent over ve years; transpor-tation costs will be cut by 20 percent. Armenia will benet from sharing an open border witha country that since 1996 has had a customsunion with the European Union for trade innon-agricultural products.For the Turkish government, a successfulrapprochement with Armenia holds out theprospect of engaging in the South Caucasus asa disinterested power. Successful normalization with Armenia would also be a major step towardaddressing the gravest historical issue confront-ing Turks worldwide. Practically speaking, it would mean an end to the perpetual humilia-tion of foreign parliaments passing genocide res-olutions condemning Turkey. For four decades, Ankara has expended time and resources resistingthese measures, yet the parliaments of nineteencountries have passed resolutions on the 1915massacres, with most designating the killings asgenocide. On March 4, 2010, the International Aairs Committee of the U.S. Congress voted toterm the killings “genocide,”
causing Turkey torecall its ambassador from Washington.However, neither the Turkish nor Armeniangovernment received a groundswell of domes-tic support for the Protocols, leaving both sidespolitically vulnerable on the issue. In Armenia,public opposition was not erce, but there waslittle popular enthusiasm. Some Armeniansexpressed short-sighted concerns about the shopsof Yerevan being ooded with cheap Turkishgoods. Sarkisian faced much stronger criti-cism when he visited Lebanon, France, and theUnited States to sell the Protocols. Some critics within the diaspora accused him of selling out Armenia’s heritage by promising to recognize thecurrent border with Turkey, agreed upon withMoscow in 1921. Others denounced the pledge
he Armenia–urkey normalization proesswas the most positive initiative in theSouth cauasus for many years, and stillhas the potential to transform the region.
Search History:
Result 00 of 00
00 results for result for
p.
Armenia and Turkey: Bridging the Gap
The current crisis between Armenia and Turkey will likely reach a head by April 24, the date commemorated as Armenian Genocide Day. While there is virtually no hope that the 2009 Armenian–Turkish Protocols will be ratified…
(More)
4.3K
Reads
26
Readcasts
6
Embed Views
Recommended
More From This User
Notes
Load more
