ANKARA, April 11 (Itar-Tass) –The Turkish-Armenian border will not be opened unless the Nagorno-Karabakh problem is resolved, Turkish Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan said.
“Unless the Nagorno-Karabakh issue is resolved, we will not take any steps towards opening the border with Armenia,” the Ihlas news agency quoted Erdogan as saying.
“Turkey will not sign the final agreement with Armenia unless Azerbaijan and Armenia reach consensus on Nagorno-Karabakh,” he said.
“We will prepare the infrastructure and do preliminary work, but this [the opening of the border] will depend entirely on the settlement of the Armenian-Azerbaijani problem. It has to be settled first,” the prime minister said.
The statement came as a response to local press reports saying that the border with Armenia may be opened before the end of this month.
Some local observers believe that these reports cause tension between Turkey and Azerbaijan, which is one of Ankara’s major partners in the region.
The newspaper Hurriyet says Ankara has promised to Baku not to open the border until the Karabakh issue was resolved.
It is believed that Azerbaijani President Ilkham Aliyev refused to attend the Alliance of Civilisations forum in Istanbul on April 6-7 because of a possible violation of Turkey’s promise.
Earlier on Friday, Armenian President Serzh Sargsyan said his country was ready to establish normal relations with Turkey without preconditions.
“The ball is in the Turkish court,” Sargsyan said.
The president expressed hope that he would be able to “cross the open Armenian-Turkish border” when he travels to Istanbul in September for a World Cup 2010 qualification football game between Armenia and Turkey.
He is “deeply and sincerely convinced” that Armenia “must establish good relations with Turkey”, and this conviction did not develop after his election as president.
Sargsyan believes that “such experienced diplomacy as the Turkish one will assess the degree of sincerity” of Armenian authorities in the establishment of relations with Ankara without preconditions.
The president said talks with Turkey had “never discussed the problem of Nagorno-Karabakh and the recognition of Armenian genocide” by the Ottoman Empire in 1915. “We do not condition normalisation of relations between the two countries on Turkey’s recognition of Armenian genocide and hope that the Turks do not consider the termination of recognition of genocide [by different countries] as such precondition”, he said.
At the same time, normalisation of relations with Turkey does not mean questioning the fact of genocide in 1915, the president said. “We regret millions of innocent victims and should do everything we can to prevent such tragedies in the future,” Sargsyan said.
The opening of the border with Turkey will not impede the Karabakh settlement, but on ten contrary will facilitate it, he added.
“We may have made a mistake in our relations with Turkey”, and they will take a totally different turn, Sargsayan said. But “even if it is a failure”, Armenia will “come out of this process stronger because the international community will see” that Yerevan “is ready to establish relations with Turkey without preconditions”.
The Nagorno-Karabakh conflict began on February 22, 1988, when the first direct confrontation occurred in the enclave after a big group of Azeris had marched towards the Armenian-populated town of Askeran, “wreaking destruction en route.” A large number of refugees fled Armenia and Azerbaijan as violence erupted against the minority populations in the two countries. In the autumn of 1989, intensified inter-ethnic conflict in and around Nagorno-Karabakh prodded the Soviet government into granting Azerbaijani authorities greater leeway in controlling the region. On November 29, 1989 direct rule in Nagorno-Karabakh was ended and Azerbaijan regained control of the region. However later a joint session of the Armenian parliament and the top legislative body of Nagorno-Karabakh proclaimed the unification of Nagorno-Karabakh with Armenia.
On December 10, 1991, Armenians in Nagorno-Karabakh held a referendum, boycotted by local Azeris, that approved the creation of an independent state. A Soviet proposal for enhanced autonomy for Nagorno-Karabakh within Azerbaijan satisfied neither side, and a full-scale war subsequently started | between Azerbaijan and Nagorno-Karabakh, the latter receiving support from Armenia.
The struggle over Nagorno-Karabakh escalated after both Armenia and Azerbaijan obtained independence from the Soviet Union in 1991. In the post-Soviet power vacuum, hostilities between Azerbaijan and Armenia were heavily influenced by the Russian military, and both the Armenian and Azerbajani military used a large number of mercenaries from Ukraine and Russia.
By the end of 1993, the conflict had caused thousands of casualties and created hundreds of thousands of refugees on both sides. By May 1994, the Armenians controlled 14 percent of the territory of Azerbaijan. At that point, the Azerbaijani government for the first time during the conflict recognised Nagorno-Karabakh as a third party in the war and began direct negotiations with the Karabakh authorities. As a result, an unofficial ceasefire was reached on May 12, 1994.
Despite the ceasefire, fatalities due to armed conflicts between Armenian and Azerbaijani soldiers continued. As of August, 2008, the United States, France, and Russia (the co-chairmen of the OSCE Minsk Group) were attempting to negotiate a full settlement of the conflict, proposing a referendum on the status of the area, which culminated in Azerbaijani President Ilkham Aliyev and Armenian President Serzh Sargsyan travelling to Moscow for talks with Russian President Dmitry Medvedev on 2 November 2008. As a result, the three presidents signed an agreement that calls for talks on a political settlement of the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict.
Source: www.itar-tass.com, 11.04.2009
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