Armenian And Turkish Diplomats Secretly Meet In Europe: Turkish Mass Media

[Siamanto]

ARMENIAN AND TURKISH DIPLOMATS SECRETLY MEET IN EUROPE: TURKISH MASS
MEDIA

YEREVAN, JULY 12. ARMINFO. A secret meeting of Armenian and Turkish
diplomats took place in a European town. As Radio "Liberty" informs,
CNN-Turk Turkish TV-channel has released this information. According
to the source, during the meeting Turkey presented its proposals on
the issue of normalization of Armenian-Turkish relations.

The meeting took place after the exchange of letters of Armenian
President Robert Kocharyan and Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip
Erdogan. To remind, the letters concerned with the issue of
recognizing Armenian Genocide. According to the same source, the
second meeting of both countriess diplomats will take place shortly in
one of European towns. Armenia will present its proposals
there. CNN-Turk also informs that Kocharyan and Erdogan have reached
an agreement to take concrete steps to satisfy both sides and to
create the atmosphere of confidence. They have not commented on this
information in Armenia's Foreign Ministry yet.

http://groong.usc.edu/news/msg118268.html

[Siamanto]

Armenia, Turkey In Secret Talks

By Armen Zakarian

Armenia and Turkey have confirmed reports that their senior diplomats
have held secret talks in an undisclosed `European city' to discuss ways
of normalizing the strained bilateral relations.

News of the meeting was first reported by Turkish media earlier this
week. The Turkish government was reportedly represented by Foreign
Ministry Deputy Undersecretary Ahmet Uzumcu and Ankara's ambassador to
Georgia, Ertan Tezgor. It is not clear who represented the Armenian
side.

The spokesman for the Turkish Foreign Ministry, Namik Tan, on Thursday
confirmed the fact of the meeting but refused to disclose any of its
details. `I think I wouldn't be able to elaborate on that because we
have had such meetings before,' Tan told RFE/RL by phone from Ankara.
Those are sort of routine meetings. When necessary, we will choose to
meet with them and we did it before.'

`We do have contacts with Armenian authorities,' the official said.

The Armenian Foreign Ministry spokesman, Hamlet Gasparian, was also
tight-lipped about the confidential negotiations. The Arminfo news
agency quoted him as saying only that they were held by `mid-level
officials' from the two governments.

Turkish newspapers reported that the two Turkish diplomats presented
their Armenian interlocutors with unspecified proposals on easing
long-running Turkish-Armenian tensions that are a major source of
instability in the region. According to the `Hurriyet' daily, the
Armenian side will respond to them and come up with its own ideas at the
next round of the talks. But it is not known when they will take place.

Ambassador Tezgor's participation in the talks suggests that they may
have been held in Tbilisi. Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan
sent a letter to President Robert Kocharian last April via Ankara's
diplomatic mission in the Georgian capital.

In that letter, Erdogan proposed that Ankara and Yerevan set up a
commission of historians who would jointly study the 1915-1918 mass
killings of Armenians in the Ottoman Empire and determine whether they
indeed constituted a genocide. Kocharian responded by calling for the
creation of a Turkish-Armenian inter-governmental body that would tackle
this and other issues of mutual concern.

The exchange of letters raised hopes for a long-awaited rapprochement
between the two historical foes. However, it was followed by renewed
mutual recriminations, with the Turks furious with continuing Armenian
campaign for international recognition of the 1915 genocide.

A halt to that campaign is one of Turkey's preconditions for
establishing diplomatic relations and reopening its border with Armenia.
Ankara also makes bilateral ties conditional on the restoration of
Azerbaijani control over Nagorno-Karabakh, a stance reaffirmed by
Erdogan during a recent visit to Baku.

Armenia, by contrast, insists on an unconditional normalization of the
relations. The United States and the European Union take a similar view.
But a senior official in the administration of President George W. Bush
told RFE/RL last month that there is little Washington can do to get
Ankara to drop its preconditions. The official also said that recent
months' progress in the Karabakh peace process bodes well for an
improvement in Turkish-Armenian relations.

Diplomatic sources in Yerevan told RFE/RL last week that Armenia and
Azerbaijan have already agreed on the main points of a Karabakh peace
accord which they said could be signed by the end of this year or at the
beginning of next. They said the lifting of the Turkish blockade is one
of those points.

Asked to comment on this, Tan, the Turkish Foreign Ministry spokesman,
said, `We are following very closely the negotiations between Armenia
and Azerbaijan on that subject and we hope that an amicable solution
will be found soon.'

http://groong.usc.edu/news/msg118412.html