Once again...no preconditions

[Joseph]

Armenia has no preconditions to normalize ties with Turkey, FM says

The Associated Press
Monday, June 25, 2007

ISTANBUL, Turkey: Armenia's foreign minister said Monday that his country was willing to normalize relations with Turkey without any preconditions.

The foreign minister, Vartan Oskanian, told reporters at a regional economic conference in Istanbul that Armenia wants to have "good neighborly relations and open its borders" with Turkey.

The two countries do not have diplomatic relations because of a historical dispute. Armenia says Turks killed up to 1.5 million Armenians around the time of World War I, toward the end of the Ottoman Empire, in what should be labeled genocide. Turkey says the killings occurred at a time of civil conflict and that the casualty figures are inflated.

"My key message today was that Armenia wants to see that border open," said Oskanian, who held a meeting with his Turkish counterpart, Abdullah Gul.

The Armenian minister said the genocide issue was "deeply rooted in the psyche" of his people, but was not an obstacle to having better relations.

"Genocide recognition, although it's in our political agenda to pursue it, has never been a precondition to normalize the relations," Oskanian said.

Turkey closed its border with Armenia in 1993 during a war between Armenia and Azerbaijan, a Muslim ally of Ankara. The move hurt the economy of tiny, landlocked Armenia.

This year, Turkey lobbied against a proposed U.S. congressional resolution that would recognize the killings of Armenians in the last century as genocide. Some of Turkey's 65,000 Armenian Orthodox Christians say they endure harassment in Turkey, which has an overwhelmingly Muslim population.

Hrant Dink, an ethnic Armenian journalist murdered in Istanbul in January, was apparently targeted by nationalists. He had been an advocate of minority rights and free expression.

[Joseph]

http://www.yerkir.am/eng/index.php?sub=news_arm&id=30947

Serzh Sargsyan does not believe that Turkey’s membership in NATO makes him more predictable

09.07.2007 12:38

YEREVAN (YERKIR) - “NATO and the European Union are turning a blind eye to Turkey’s long-running blockade of our borders. Ankara’s refusal to open land routes is costing the small, landlocked state a third of its Gross Domestic Product (GDP). Europeans are shy over these issues. They love to talk about human rights, about democratic values but it’s much easier to talk rather than to implement anything,” Prime Minister Serzh Sargsyan stated in an interview to Reuters.

Reuters reminds that “Turkey shut its borders to Christian Armenia in 1993 to protest against the capture by Armenian forces of territory inside Azerbaijan, Ankara’s historic Muslim ally, during fighting over the Nagorno Karabakh region. Ankara says it will not reopen its frontier until Armenia reaches a peace agreement with Azerbaijan”.

The blockade, coupled with similar measures by Azerbaijan, means Armenia has to route its trade through its land border with Georgia, or over treacherous mountain passes that link it to Iran. Those difficulties greatly increase costs.

Sargsyan said Armenia wants to resume relations with Turkey without preconditions and would not obstruct Turkey’s desire to join the EU because this might make Ankara “more predictable”.

“Although NATO officials tell us that Turkey is predictable as it’s a member of NATO, I don’t believe it because even before our blockade Turkey was a member of NATO when it occupied Cyprus,” the Prime Minister of Armenia added.

Reuters also underlines that Armenia and Turkey have a long history of enmity, arising from the killings of up to 1.5 million Armenians under the Ottoman Empire in 1915-17.

“Armenians and some European nations describe the deaths as genocide. Turkey says they were part of a partisan conflict during World War One. It is a crime in Turkey to refer to the killings as a genocide,” PanARMENIAN.Net quoted Reuters as reporting.

[Joseph]

Statement by FM Vartan Oskanian

source: http://www.eafjd.org/spip.php?breve804&lang=en

Vartan Oskanian : A bold message, lost on Turkey

Armenia should be rejoicing at the passage of a bill last week by France’s National Assembly that would make it a crime to deny the genocide of Armenians by the Ottoman Empire in the early 20th century.

The message from France is clear: So long as Turkey refuses to confront its own history, others will feel impelled to do so. If, on the other hand, Turkey embarks on the difficult road of acknowledgement and reconciliation, then others will have reason to step aside and let the process take its course.

Instead, we note with dismay that this very strong message is being lost on Turkey. It continues to surround itself with myths, evade the past, and thus elude the future.

As we observe the reactions in Turkey, we find it disingenuous for a country that itself doesn’t allow free speech and criminalizes even the exploration of certain areas of its own (and therefore our) history to be so indignant over a law that criminalizes the rejection and denial of that same history.

After all, the actual, difficult discourse must evolve in Turkey, and not in France, or Switzerland. It is in Turkey that a free and open dialogue is deeply needed, and sorely absent. Those who cry "leave history to the historians" have gagged the historians.

At the same time, Turkey objects vehemently to the involvement of third countries in a discussion that really must take place between Turks and Armenians.

No one wants such a dialogue more than Armenia. Yet Turkey has made such give-and-take between our peoples and our states impossible. In addition to the restrictions on speech, our borders remain closed. Nor are there diplomatic relations between our countries.

In other words, there are no opportunities for new experiences, new memories, new interactions to build up alongside the old. Instead, there is a lingering security concern about a neighbor that has not repudiated such state violence.

As Turkey continues to corner itself, it handicaps the future of this region and impacts the lives of its people and ours. Worse, those extremists who understand the great risks and costs of tolerance, openness and rapprochement, are emboldened.

We are not the only neighbors in the world who have a troubled relationship. Yet it is exactly because we live right next door that we must be willing and prepared to transcend the past.

France’s principled acknowledgement of the 20th century’s first genocide offers the hundreds of thousands of French Armenians, all descended from genocide survivors, the dignity that they have been denied because of the Turkish government’s continuing insistence that the atrocities they lived through are unproven myths.

There is no doubt that if the word "genocide" had existed in 1915, every one of the hundreds of articles in newspapers around the world would have used it. Look how frequently the word is used today to describe events and cases where the scale and depth of the carnage are even smaller.

When a government plans to do away with its own population to solve a political problem, that’s genocide. The U.S. ambassador to Turkey from 1913 to 1916, Henry Morgenthau Sr., called what he witnessed the "Murder of a Nation." Others called it "race murder." They did so because the term genocide did not exist yet.

Those who deposed the Ottoman rulers - the early leaders of modern Turkey, including Kemal Ataturk - actually court-martialed those who instigated these crimes. Today’s Republic of Turkey, which has inherited the nationalism of its founders but not their memory, spends untold amounts to convince the world they didn’t happen.

Not just money. Today, their continued insistence on rejecting and rewriting history costs them credibility and time. Today’s Turks do not bear the guilt of the perpetrators, unless they choose to defend and identify with them.

It is a political reality that both Turkey and Armenia exist today in the international community with their current borders. It is a political reality that we are neighbors. It is a political reality that Armenia is not a security threat to Turkey. Finally, it is a reality that today’s Armenia calls for the establishment of diplomatic relations with today’s Turkey.

Armenia has no preconditions for establishing diplomatic relations. Nor is Armenia opposed to Turkey’s membership in the EU. We’d like to see Turkey meet all European standards. We’d like to see Turkey become an EU member so that our borders will be open and we can cooperate to build a secure, prosperous region.

We can only assume that Europe will expect that a Turkey which is serious about EU membership will come to terms with its past. A few in Turkish society have begun that difficult process of introspection and study. We can only welcome this process.

It is essential that the international community does not bend the rules, does not turn a blind eye, does not lower its standards, but instead consistently extends its hand, its example, its own history of transcending, in order for Armenians and Turks, Europeans all, to move on to making new history.

Vartan Oskanian