Theme: Turkey and Armenia, backed by the US and Russia, agreed
a framework on 23 April 2009 to normalise their relations and end one
of the most intractable disputes left from the collapse of the Soviet
Union. Turkey closed its border with Armenia in 1993 in support of
its ally Azerbaijan, which was in conflict with Armenia over the
enclave of Nagorno-Karabakh.
Summary: Abdullah Gül, Turkey’s President, kicked
off the rapprochement with Armenia with some football diplomacy. In
September 2008 he watched a World Cup qualifying game between Turkey
and Armenia in Yerevan, the Armenian capital. It was the first-ever
visit by a Turkish President to Armenia and broke the ice. Resolving
the dispute between the two countries, however, requires a great deal
of political will and compromise on both sides as their positions are
very entrenched. The thorniest issue is how to address the 1915
massacre of up to 1.5 million Armenians, which Armenia and its
diaspora label genocide, a term that Turkey virulently refuses to
accept. The other major issue is to what extent the conflict over
Nagorno-Karabakh has to be resolved before diplomatic relations are
restored and the border opened. The economies of both countries, but
particularly landlocked Armenia’s, would benefit from normal
relations. And Turkey’s bid to become a full member of the EU,
moving at a snail’s pace, would receive a boost as one more
obstacle would be removed. Open borders is an EU membership
requirement. This is particularly important this year as there is a
deadline for Turkey to normalise relations with the Greek Cypriots,
something that requires resolution of or, at least, progress on
Cyprus, the Mediterranean island partitioned between Greek and
Turkish Cypriots after Turkey’s invasion in 1974.
Analysis: The agreement between Turkey and Armenia, after
secret talks in Switzerland for almost two years, came one day before
Barack Obama was due to give the annual 24 April statement by US
Presidents on the issue of the killing of Armenians. Obama, to the
relief of the Turkish government, refrained from branding the
massacre a genocide, breaking a campaign promise while contending
that his views about the slaughter had not changed. Instead, in a
written statement, he called it ‘one of the great atrocities of
the 20th century’. The fact that the agreement came on the eve
of the statement suggested that Turkey had reached the accord with
Armenia to discourage Obama from using the G-word. Earlier, on 6
April, Obama had made Turkey the first European and Muslim country he
visited on a bilateral basis, emphasising the strategic importance
for his Administration of the nation and reflecting his policy of
reaching out during his first 100 days in office to the Islamic
world. Had Obama used the G-word it would have inflamed Turkey and
undoubtedly undone all the goodwill created during his visit.
Figure 1. Turkey and Armenia
Source: Financial Times.
Turkey was the first country after the US to recognise Armenia in
December 1991, following the collapse of the Soviet Union. The
railway between its border town of Kars and the Armenian town of
Gyumri was opened and electricity was provided. In 1992, Turkey led
efforts to give Armenia a founding seat in an Istanbul-based regional
grouping, the Organisation of the Black Sea Economic Cooperation
(BSEC) and Azerbaijan was also given a seat (see the chronology in
the Annex). Levon Ter-Petrosian, the first President of Armenia,
sought to normalise relations with Turkey, but Ankara did not take up
the opportunity to establish diplomatic relations and when the
Nagorno-Karabakh war erupted in 1993 it closed the rail link as part
of the sanctions when Armenia captured the Kelbajar district of Azerbaijan.
The Nagorno-Karabakh Dispute
The rivalry for control of Nagorno-Karabakh (see Figure 2) between
ethnic Armenians and Azeris dates back well over a century into
competition between Christian Armenian and Muslim Turkic and Persian
influences. The Soviet Union incorporated the territory, populated
for hundreds of years by Armenian and Turkic farmers, herdsmen and
traders, into Azerbaijan in 1923. In December 1991, as the Soviet
Union was collapsing, a referendum held there and in the neighbouring
district of Shahumian resulted in a declaration of independence from
Azerbaijan as the Nagorno-Karabakh Republic (NKR), which is still
unrecognised by any country including Armenia. In the final years
before the dissolution of the Soviet Union, the region became a
source of dispute between Armenia and Azerbaijan. Up to 30,000 people
were killed and more than one million fled their homes.
Nagorno-Karabakh is legally part of Azerbaijan but has been
controlled by ethnic Armenians since the war ended in 1994. Armenians
have also occupied large tracts of Azeri territory outside
Nagorno-Karabakh. Officials from Armenia and Azerbaijan have been
holding talks, mediated by the Minsk Group of the Organisation for
Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE), with little success.
Figure 2. Nagorno-Karabakh
Source: The BBC.
Turkey has strong relations with Azerbaijan based on trade, shared
oil and gas pipelines and a sense of common destiny in an ethnic,
cultural and linguistic Turkic world. Azerbaijan is oil rich and
Turkey very energy dependent. Turkey was the first
country to recognise Azerbaijan after it declared independence in
1991. In 2008, the two countries exchanged 10 state visits at the
Presidential and Prime Ministerial level. The close relations are
underscored by the saying ‘one nation, two states’. The
relationship has an important strategic dimension in the form of the
Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan oil pipeline (which runs just 10 miles from the
ceasefire line), the Baku-Tbilisi-Erzurum gas pipeline and the
Baku-Tbilisi-Kars railway project which is under construction.
The first government of Azerbaijan in 1992-93 was led by Abulfez
Elchibey, a keen supporter of greater Turkic links. These relations
have so far conditioned Turkey-Armenia normalisation as Ankara has
always insisted on Armenia’s withdrawal from occupied
Azerbaijani territories as a precondition for opening the border and
establishing diplomatic relations with Armenia. In the eyes of
Armenia, Turkey’s policy is hostage to its relations with Azerbaijan.
Baku has let it be known that if this condition is lifted, it might
restrict Turkey’s participation in the expansion of Azerbaijani
oil and gas exports. Ilham Aliyev, Azerbaijan’s President,
cancelled his attendance at the summit meeting in Istanbul of the
‘Alliance of Civilisations’ (sponsored by Turkey and
Spain) on 6-7 April, apparently because Ankara did not confirm or
deny media reports of de-linkage.
It is unclear whether Ankara’s position has changed. It is caught between a rock and
a hard place. Turkish analysts believe it is unlikely that Ankara
would accept a total de-linking of the two issues. Also, Armenia
would not want to publicly and explicitly negotiate Nagorno-Karabakh
with Turkey, but may nevertheless understand that progress with
Turkey depends on some withdrawal. If there is no change at all in
Armenian occupation this would hinder Ankara’s efforts to
normalise relations. Armenia could withdraw from some rayons (Kelbecer) but not all (Lacin) of them.
The Issue of What to Call the 1915 Killing of Up to 1.5 Million Armenians
Nothing enflames passions in Turkey more than the 1915 destruction of
the Armenian communities of Anatolia, and the question of whether it
Only recently, as a result of the democratisation aided by Turkey’s
process of seeking to join the EU, has the issue begun to be discussed
relatively freely and without incurring criminal charges. In the highest-profile case, Orhan Pamuk, the 2006 Nobel laureate for
literature, almost landed himself in jail in January of that year for
publicly degrading the Turkish nation after he referred to the
killing of Armenians and Kurds in an interview he gave to a Swiss
newspaper and appeared in court after he was charged by an
ultra-nationalist judge. The case was dropped.
The official Turkish view, ground into schoolchildren from an early
age, is that the Armenian population was responsible for what
happened by siding with Russia during World War I. The Ottoman
authorities, according to the narrative set in stone by the Turkish
Historical Society, set up in the 1930s, responded with mass
deportation of the Armenian population. The Republic of Turkey was founded in 1923 on the ruins of the Ottoman Empire.
Resolutions commemorating the 1915 genocide have been passed by more
than 20 parliaments, including France and Germany whose current
governments are not in favour of Turkey’s full EU membership.
The US Congress was on the point of voting on a non-binding
resolution condemning the Armenian genocide in September 2007, but
called it off at the last minute because of fears of how Turkey would
react and the impact on the already strained US-Turkey relations
(over Iraq). President Barack Obama, Vice-President Joe Biden,
Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and the Speaker of the House of
Representatives Nancy Pelosi are all on record for calling the
massacre a genocide.
Obama stopped short of calling it a genocide when he addressed the
Turkish parliament in April and when he gave the traditional White
House statement on 24 April commemorating the atrocities. His avoidance of the word outraged the Armenian diaspora around the
world, principally in the US, Russia, France and Lebanon, which is
estimated to be twice as big as the population of Armenia (3 million) and is much more vociferous on the genocide issue.
The taboo in Turkey on questioning the official version of what
happened has gradually given way to a more open and sober debate. An
important crack in the wall was the holding of the first conference
in Turkey in September 2005 to debate the fate of the Ottoman
Armenians, which went ahead, despite stiff opposition, including an
attack on the organisers by Cemil Çiçek, the Justice
Minister in the former government of the Justice and Development
(AKP) party and now the Deputy Prime Minister, who accused them of ‘stabbing the Turkish people in the back’.
A turning point came in January 2007 when the Turkish-Armenian
journalist Hrant Dink, editor of the weekly newspaper Agos,
was murdered in front of his office in Istanbul. Hundreds of
thousands of people took to the streets chanting ‘we are all
Armenians’ (Dink has been put on trial in 2002 for stating at a
conference ‘I am not a Turk… but an Armenian from Turkey’).
Nevertheless, the official version is still being heavily propagated
in some quarters. In February 2009, Turkey’s Ministry of
Education sent a circular reminding schools to show a documentary,
‘Sari Gelin (Yellow Bride) – The True Story’,
first aired in 2003 by state television (TRT) and report back. In six
40-minute episodes, it sets out the case that Armenians were
responsible for their own destruction through subversion and
rebellion. In one scene Turkish villages recall ‘children were
cooked over the fire… women were forced to eat their
husbands’. Serdar Kaya, a father of an 11-year-old girl, filed
a complaint with the Public Prosecutor’s office and the
Ministry withdrew the documentary.
At the same time, however, no legal action has been taken against the
publication this year of the private diaries of Talat Pasha, an
Ottoman leader during World War I and the main organiser of the 1915
Armenian policy, which showed he meticulously supervised the
relocation of 935,367 Armenians, of whom he counted 90% as ‘missing’
The essence of this issue boils down to what exactly constitutes
genocide, a subject that is now much more studied by academics and
which does not focus almost exclusively on the Holocaust. The
starting point is the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of
the Crime of Genocide, adopted by the UN General Assembly in 1948. The Convention defines ‘genocide’ as:
‘... any of the following
acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a
national, ethnic, racial or religious group, as such (a) killing
members of the group; (b) causing serious bodily or mental harm to
members of the group; (c) deliberately inflicting on the group
conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction
in whole or in part; (d) imposing measures intended to prevent births
within the group; (e) forcibly transferring children of the group to another group’.
As the European Stability Initiative (ESI) points out there is now a
considerable body of court cases, official declarations and academic
studies applying this definition to both historical and contemporary
events, for example for events in Guatemala between 1981 and 1983 and
the 1995 Srebrenica massacre in Bosnia-Herzegovina.
Among many reasons why the Turkish government will not
accept the term genocide is that this could lay Turkey open to claims
on territory and reparations. However, as this tragedy happened almost
decade before Turkey was created, the country today is not legally
responsible for acts committed almost 100 years ago.
What is needed to get out of this minefield, as Christopher de
Bellaigue suggests in his recent book is a ‘vaguer
designation for the events of 1915, avoiding the G-word but clearly
connoting criminal acts of slaughter, to which reasonable scholars
can subscribe and which a child might be taught’.
A way forward, as apparently agreed, would be to set up a Joint
History Commission. In 2005, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, Turkey’s
Prime Minister, suggested to the then Armenian President Robert
Kocharian that the two sides submit the issue of 1915 to an
independent commission of historians and experts which would delve
into the archives of not only Turkey and Armenia but also in those of
relevant third countries such as Russia, the UK, France, Germany and
the US. But Armenia did not take up the offer. According to an
article by Yücel Güclü, First Counsellor at the
Turkish Embassy in Washington, ‘without joint consideration of
all evidence, the wounds of the past will not heal and, indeed, when
an incomplete narrative enters the political realm, the consequences
can be grave’.
Conclusion: Turkey and Armenian both stand to gain from reconciliation. But old
prejudices on each side die hard. Landlocked Armenia, dependent on
rail and road connections through Georgia and its Black Sea ports,
would gain access to the port of Trabzon if the border with Turkey
was opened. Trade with Turkey would begin to flourish and foreign
direct investment could rise from very low levels as Armenia’s
risk perception would be lowered. For Ankara, the opening of the
border with Armenia (Turkey has seven frontiers) would complete its policy of ‘zero problems with neighbours’.
The recommendations of the International Crisis
Group, an NGO dedicated to conflict resolution, could, if followed
quickly, lead to Armenian President Serzh Sargsyan attending the return football match in Istanbul between Turkey and
Armenia. The ball is in both courts.
Journalist and writer, author of four
Working Papers on Turkey for the Elcano Royal Institute
Annex: Chronology of Turkey-Armenia Relations
1800-1923: Ottoman Empire collapses to one-quarter its size under onslaught from Russia,
the UK and France and new Balkan states, forcing many Turks and
Muslims to fall back on the land of modern Turkey. Between two and
five million Turks and Muslims die in massacres and forced deportations.
1890-96, 1915-20: Massacres and uprisings involving Armenian Christians of the Ottoman Empire,
mainly in what is now central and eastern Turkey. These included a
massive First World War relocation of Armenians starting on 24 April
1915, during which about one million persons were massacred or died
of disease. Armenians and many others describe this as the Armenian Genocide.
1921: Turkey, Soviet Russia, Armenia, Azerbaijan and Georgia sign the Treaty of
Kars, establishing peace and today’s borders between Turkey and the south Caucasus states, including Armenia.
1973-85: Armenian terrorists kill 30 Turkish diplomats and diplomatic staff and 26
others in 45 attacks around the world, seeking Turkish recognition of
an Armenian genocide, reparations and territory.
1991: Turkey becomes the second state to formally recognise Armenian independence.
A railway line open since 1980s between Kars and Gyumri begins to carry US-financed wheat to Armenia.
break out in Nagorno-Karabakh, an ethnic Armenian enclave within
Azerbaijan. Main fighting begins 1992. By a ceasefire in 1994, ethnic
Armenian forces occupy at least one-eighth of Azerbaijan.
1992: Turkey ensures that both Armenia and Azerbaijan join the Istanbul-based
Organisation of the Black Sea Economic Cooperation.
1993: As ethnic Armenian forces advance into Azerbaijan, Turkey closes the
railway line that is its only transport link with Armenia.
1995: Turkey opens an air corridor over its territory to Yerevan.
1998: Robert Kocharian is elected President of Armenia, making genocide
recognition a central part of his foreign policy.
2000: Draft US House of Representatives Resolution 596 calls on President Bill
Clinton to use the term ‘genocide’ in characterising the
1915 events. A last-minute intervention by Clinton, arguing that it
would damage US-Turkish relations, causes the bill to be withdrawn.
Turkey protests by briefly imposing tougher visa restrictions on Armenians travelling to Turkey.
2001: Turkish-Armenian Reconciliation Commission (TARC) is established in Geneva, aiming to
improve relations between Turkey and Armenia. Bilateral civil society projects blossom.
2008: Turkish President Abdullah Gül visits Yerevan upon invitation by the
Armenian President Sarkisian to attend an Armenia-Turkey World Cup qualifier football match.
Source: Turkey and Armenia: Opening Minds, Opening Borders,
Crisis Group Europe Report 199, 14 April 2009