Armenian Foreign Minister Edward Nalbandian has slammed Turkey for reneging on its pledge to display a commitment to reconcile with Armenia following a century of hostilities, while urging Turkey to immediately ratify the protocols signed in Zurich.
In an op-ed he published in The Wall Street Journal on Tuesday, Nalbandian said Turkey had backtracked from the Zurich protocols — which it signed on Oct. 10, 2009, in an effort to reconcile with Armenia — and Ankara had returned to the language of preconditions that it used before the rapprochement process began.
“It seems we speak in different languages,” Nalbandian said, adding that Turkey claimed to have no preconditions, but then demanded Armenia fulfill this or that condition before they could proceed with the ratification. “Does this mean they have no preconditions?” he asked.
Nalbandian also criticized Turkey’s attempts to link the Armenian-Turkish normalization process to the settlement of the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict and said any Turkish attempts to interfere in the Karabakh process or to link the normalization of its relations with Armenia upon its own perception of progress in the Nagorno-Karabakh talks harmed both processes.
13 October 2010, Wednesday
TODAY’S ZAMAN İSTANBUL