A senior US official said on Tuesday that the US continues to strongly support direct dialogue and the normalization of relations between Turkey and Armenia.
Turkey and Armenia made a bold move two years ago to normalize relations and establish diplomatic ties after a century of animosity between the two nations, but the process stalled after both sides proposed a number of preconditions before displaying the political will to implement the vision detailed in the documents.
Philip Gordon, US assistant secretary of state for European and Eurasian affairs, when asked if Turkish and American officials are going to discuss the Turkish-Armenian reconciliation process in their upcoming meetings as he spoke to foreign reporters in Washington on Thursday, said that as a general rule, when Turkish and American diplomats and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and her Turkish counterpart, Ahmet Davutoğlu, meet, the question of Turkish-Armenian reconciliation comes up “because it’s very important to us.”
American officials frequently stress the importance of Turkey and Armenia reconciling amid increasing pressure by Armenian lobbying groups in the US on members of Congress and the administration to use sharp language when referring to mass killings of Armenians in 1915, events Armenians term “genocide.”
Turkey and Armenia signed two protocols in 2009 to normalize ties. The protocols called for the opening of their shared border within two months if the two countries’ parliaments ratify the protocols. After Azerbaijan, a key ally for Turkey, expressed its dissatisfaction with the process, Turkey pegged the ratification of the process to a real breakthrough in the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict. Armenia thus suspended the process on April 22 of last year.
The administration official said there have been efforts over the past several years to improve that relationship, which the US made clear it strongly supports, adding that those efforts have recently stalled, a development he said the US made clear it regrets. “We believe it’s in the interest of both countries to continue the normalization process, re-establish relations and have friendly relations and open trade from which both countries would benefit,” Gordon said. Gordon stated that American officials bring the reconciliation process up very frequently with their counterparts on both the Turkish and Armenian sides.
Zaman