By Jonathan Liew

The Telegraph (UK)
Published: 9:41AM BST 14 Oct 2009

Armenian president Serzh Sarkisian is scheduled to attend a World Cup qualifying game between the two countries in the Turkish city of Bursa, days after they signed an agreement establishing diplomatic relations for the first time.

The trip, which has been described as an act of “football diplomacy”, follows a visit by Abdullah Gul, the Turkish president, to Armenia last year.

The pact was signed on Saturday after six weeks of fraught talks and is seen as a significant step towards reconciliation between the two neighbours, who have never had formal diplomatic relations.

It will open the border between the two countries for the first time since 1993, when it was closed by Turkey in protest at Armenia’s backing for ethnic Armenian rebels fighting for control of Nagorno-Karabakh, an enclave of neighbouring Azerbaijan.

However, it fails to resolve Armenia and Turkey’s most long-standing bone of contention – the massacre of up to 1.5 million Armenians during World War One.

Armenia insists the killing be recognised as a genocide, a term that Turkey has refused to accept. The agreement merely pledges to set up a joint commission of historians that will investigate the massacres.

There has been strong domestic opposition to the agreement, which still requires ratification by both country’s parliaments.

On Friday around 10,000 protesters gathered in the Armenian capital Yerevan to oppose its signing, while the nationalist Armenian Revolutionary Federation has vowed to block the accord, threatening “regime change if necessary”.

In addition, news of the deal has alarmed neighbouring Azerbaijan, who issued a strongly worded statement saying that the normalisation of ties between Turkey and Armenia would “contradict its national interests”.

As the region’s pre-eminent oil and gas power, Azerbaijan fears that the pact could undermine its negotiating position with Armenia over Nagorno-Karabakh.

It is a close ally of Turkey and shares close cultural and linguistic ties with the fellow Muslim state.

As the Soviet Union began to break up in the late 1980s, a bloody war between Azerbaijan and Armenia saw some 30,000 people killed. Ethnic Armenians drove out Azeri troops and took control of seven districts adjacent to Nagorno-Karabakh.

Recep Tayyip Erdogan, the Turkish prime minister, has insisted that parliamentary ratification is dependent on Armenia withdrawing from these territories.

“These are age-old problems that go back to the creation of the Turkish nation,” said Cengiz Aktar, an international relations expert at Bahcesehir University in Istanbul.

“There are no quick fixes, but historically it’s a landmark.”

Omer Taspinar, Turkey project director at the Brookings Institution in Washington, said: “The signing may be the easy part at this point.

“We may end up in a kind of awkward situation where there are diplomatic relations, but the border is still closed.”

Better ties between Turkey and Armenia have been a key goal of president Barack Obama, who is keen to facilitate the growing role of the Caucasus region as a corridor for energy supplies.