By MARC CHAMPION in Istanbul and NICHOLAS BIRCH in Kars, Turkey

Turkey has dropped a key condition to signing an agreement Saturday that would reopen its border with Armenia and establish diplomatic relations between the two nations, which have been divided for generations by a dispute over genocide.

“The agreement will be signed on Oct. 10,” Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan told The Wall Street Journal — provided, he said, that Armenia doesn’t ask for changes to the text.

Supporters of the pact — which include the U.S. and the European Union — say they hope the change could trigger a virtuous cycle, opening up and stabilizing a region that is increasingly important for oil and gas transit and last year saw a war between Russia and Georgia.

But in Kars, the Turkish city closest to the Armenian border, skeptics point to a concrete monument to unity between the two peoples to show why an embrace between neighbors is far from certain.

The statue of two 100-foot tall human figures, standing face to face on a hill above the city, is incomplete: A giant hand that would join the figures was never attached.

It lies abandoned on the gravel below.

The monument, built last year, is now under threat of destruction.

“Small-minded people blocked the monument and they will block the peace process too,” says Naif Alibeyoglu, who had the statue built when he was mayor of Kars. His 10 years in office ended in March. “You wait and see, [the deal] will end up like my statue: a statue without hands.”

Supporters of the agreement, however, have sidestepped a significant hurdle: Turkish Prime Minister Erdogan said in an interview Sunday that the signing wasn’t dependent on progress at talks this week between the leaders of Armenia and Azerbaijan over their territorial conflict in Nagorno-Karabakh.

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It was because of Armenia’s effective occupation of the ethnic Armenian enclave in Azerbaijan that Turkey closed the border in 1993.

An earlier attempt to sign the protocol in April stalled when Mr. Erdogan said it could go forward only after the Karabakh conflict was resolved.

The parliaments of Armenia and Turkey need to ratify the protocol for it to take force, something Mr. Erdogan said he couldn’t guarantee, as parliamentarians in Ankara would have a free vote in a secret ballot.

Mr. Erdogan also said the two processes — a resolution of the Karabakh conflict and rapprochement between Turkey and Armenia — remain linked, and that a positive outcome at this week’s talks, to be held in Moldova, would help overall.

Turkish officials have continued to indicate that the border could take longer to open than the three months set out in the three-page protocol.

The Turkish leader said the only obstacle to signing the deal Saturday would come if Armenia seeks to alter the text.

“This is perhaps the most important point — that Armenia should not allow its policies to be taken hostage by the Armenian diaspora,” Mr. Erdogan said. Much of Armenia’s large diaspora opposes the protocol.

A spokesman for Armenian President Serge Sarkisian declined to comment on whether Armenia would seek changes to the protocol.

He said the government would soon make a statement on “steps” concerning the protocol.

Mr. Sarkisian has spent the week on a multination tour to explain his position to diaspora groups, some of which have protested the pact.

Opponents say it will be used by Turkey to reduce international pressure on it to recognize as genocide the 1915 slaughter of up to 1.5 million ethnic Armenians in what was then the Ottoman Empire.

The protocol would recognize the current frontier between Turkey and Armenia, and would set up a joint commission to review issues of history, likely to include the 1915 massacres. Turkey says they were collateral deaths during what amounted to civil war during World War I.

Mr. Alibeyoglu, the former Kars mayor, worked hard to improve relations between his city — a former Armenian capital that changed hands and populations several times over centuries — and its natural hinterland, the Caucasus.

He invited Armenian, Azeri and Georgian artists to festivals, signed sister-city agreements with cities across the region and, in 2004, gathered 50,000 signatures for a petition demanding the opening of the Turkish-Armenian border.

Kars would stand to benefit from the ability to trade across a border 25 miles away by train and truck.

But some 20% of the city’s population are ethnic Azerbaijanis, who consider opening the border while Armenia remains in control of a fifth of Azerbaijan’s territory a betrayal.

Sculptor Mehmet Aksoy says he abandoned his plan to run water down the statues to pool as tears, because nationalists complained these would be tears of Armenian rejoicing at reclaiming territory.

Indeed, one complaint of nationalist opponents of the protocol in Armenia is that the treaty’s recognition of current borders would prevent any future claim to the swathe of Eastern Turkey that Armenia won in a 1920 treaty, only to lose it again in the 1921 Treaty of Kars between Russia and Turkey.

“Why is one figure standing with its head bowed, as if ashamed?” asks Oktay Aktas, an ethnic Azeri and local head of the Nationalist Action Party, or MHP, who wants the statue torn down. “Turkey has nothing to be ashamed of.”

In fact, the two figures stand ramrod straight.

On the other side of the border, Armenian nationalists have taken to the streets to protest the pact with Turkey.

Turkey and Armenia are “like two neighbors who do not know each other,” says Mr. Alibeyoglu, who in 2004 organized a petition to open the border. “Is he a terrorist? A mafioso? We needed to break the ice.”

Nationalists applied to Turkey’s Commission for Monuments to get construction of the monument stopped, on the basis that a viewing platform was built without permission.

In November, the commission ordered that it be demolished.

The monument’s fate awaits a decision from the central government in Ankara.

Printed in The Wall Street Journal, page A10