Published: Friday September 18, 2009
The many faces of Turkish diplomacy. Nareh Balian / © 2009 Armenian Reporter LLC. All Rights Reserved.
The Turkish government this week once again showed that it has no intention of ending Turkey’s 16-year-old blockade of Armenia and establishing diplomatic relations with its eastern neighbor.
And if it doesn’t mean to go through with the agreements it has initialed and has committed itself to signing in mid-October, then the whole process is a farce. It is a farce intended to extract concessions from Armenia, while demonstrating to the West a nonexistent commitment to good-neighborly sentiments.
What happened this week is simple. Turkey’s Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoglu assured the leaders of opposition parties in his country, “We won’t take a step which will sadden our Azerbaijani brothers.” He added, “They are being informed of the entire process imminently and it will go on as before.”
The promise remains: The entire process “will go on as before.”
In Istanbul on April 6, President Barack Obama said talks between Armenia and Turkey could “bear fruit very quickly very soon.” In response, Turkey’s President Abdullah Gül said a breakthrough was not imminent, noting that “issues between Armenia and Azerbaijan” must first be resolved.
On April 19 Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan reiterated that point. He said, “A decision to open the border gate with Armenia will depend on the Nagorno-Karabakh issue being solved. If the Armenian occupation of Azeri territory continues, Turkey will not open its border gate.” He repeated the promise more than once after that.
So what are we to believe? The officials, who say they won’t open the border, or the protocols initialed by the same officials, which say that Turkey will open the border? The protocols will not come into effect without parliamentary ratification, so the statements and the protocols can be reconciled in one way: if ratification is withheld because Armenia won’t capitulate in Karabakh.
Turkey seeks to get Armenia’s National Assembly unilaterally to ratify an agreement in which Armenia agrees to concessions, while Turkey itself has no intention of ratifying the agreement or opening the illegally closed border.
The international community should not be credulous enough to take the signature of Turkish officials at face value.
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