TURKEY ’NEARLY OPENED ARMENIAN BORDER IN 2003’

2/04/05
A EurasiaNet Partner Post from RFE/RL
By Emil Danielyan

Turkey came within an inch of opening its border with Armenia in the summer of 2003 but backed off after U.S. pressure on Ankara "all but disappeared," a renowned scholar David Phillips, privy to Turkish-American dealings writes in his latest book.

According to a State Department report obtained by RFE/RL shortly afterward, Powell pressed the newly installed government of Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan to open the Turkish-Armenian border without any preconditions.

Phillips writes that Turkish Foreign Minister Abdullah Gul faced equally strong pressure when he held talks in Washington in late July 2003 with Powell, Vice President Dick Cheney, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and President George W. Bush’s chief national security adviser, Condoleeza Rice. "At every meeting Gul was reminded that the issue of genocide recognition [by the U.S. Congress] was not going away. He was told that real progress was the best way of deflecting pressure," he says.

The lifting of the blockade, imposed by Ankara in 1993 out of solidarity with Turkic Azerbaijan, has also been sought by Turkish business circles and local authorities in Turkey’s economically underdeveloped eastern regions. "The city is dying," one of TARC’s Turkish members, Ustun Erguder, is quoted as telling Phillips after visiting Kars, a town near the Armenian border, in 2003.

So why did it remain closed? The TARC facilitator suggests several reasons, the first and foremost of them being an apparent shift in the Bush administration’s regional priorities. He explains that as the security situation in Iraq deteriorated in the summer of 2003 Washington turned to the Turks for support and could no longer keep them under strong pressure.
"With the Bush administration preoccupied by Iraq, U.S. pressure on Ankara to open the Turkish-Armenian border all but disappeared," Phillips says. "By the time Gul and [Armenian Foreign Minister Vartan] Oskanian met in New York on September 23, Gul knew he had the upper hand."

Ankara would not even agree to a partial opening of the frontier for diplomatic passport holders and third-country nationals.

Phillips also lays the blame on the Armenian Revolutionary Federation (Dashnaktsutyun), one of the three parties represented in Kocharian’s government. "At a critical point in Ankara’s deliberations, the Dashnak Party launched a nonsensical campaign to keep the border closed," he says, citing statements to that effect made by its leaders in July 2003. Some Armenian members of TARC likewise believe that those statements were exploited by the Turkish government.


Note: Above are excerpts from the article. The full article appears here. Clarifications and comments by me are contained in {}. Deletions are marked by [...]. The bold emphasis is mine.