Clash of civilisations

May 17th 2007 | KARS
The Economist

Beleaguered Armenians in Turkey—and a closed border with Armenia

FOR a seasoned diplomat, Hasan Sultanoglu Zeynalov, Azerbaijan's consul-general in Kars, eastern Turkey, is unusually indiscreet. He openly complains about Naif Alibeyoglu, the mayor, who is promoting dialogue between Turkey, Azerbaijan and their common enemy, Armenia, just over the border. “I don't believe in dialogue,” Mr Zeynalov snorts. He recently ordered his compatriots to boycott an arts festival organised by the mayor after finding that “there were Armenians too.” Like his masters in Baku, Mr Zeynalov is unnerved at the thought of his country's biggest regional ally suddenly making peace with Armenia.

He will have been cheered by the victory of Serzh Sarkisian, Armenia's nationalist prime minister, in a general election on May 12th. Mr Sarkisian is said to have engineered a last-minute ban on Turkish observers of the election. “I think it would be unnatural to receive observing representatives from a country that does not even wish to have a civilised official dialogue,” he commented.

Mr Sarkisian's hawkish views are echoed by Robert Kocharian, the Armenian president, whom he is tipped to succeed in a presidential election next year. Both men hail from Nagorno-Karabakh, a mountainous enclave wrested by the Armenians from Azerbaijan in a vicious war in the early 1990s. This prompted Turkey to seal its border (but not air links) with Armenia in 1993. The effect on Kars's economy has been disastrous, which is why Mr Alibeyoglu is so keen to reopen the border.

Ethnic Azeris, who make up a third of his city's 80,000 residents, are less enthusiastic. They are likely to vote in droves for the far-right MHP party in Turkey's parliamentary election on July 22nd. The party's fortunes have risen on a tide of xenophobic nationalism that has engulfed Turkey. Dismissing opinion polls that give Mr Alibeyoglu's AK party a big lead over its rivals, Oktay Aktas, the local MHP boss, confidently predicts victory. He would like Turkey to invade northern Iraq and to hang the Kurdish PKK rebel leader, Abdullah Ocalan. He also says there is no question of easing the blockade on Armenia—certainly not until it stops referring to his region as western Armenia and calling the mass killings of Ottoman Armenians in 1915 a genocide.

The sensitiveness of the genocide issue was reflected in January in the killing of Hrant Dink, an ethnic-Armenian newspaper editor in Istanbul, who had talked openly about it. The killer was a school dropout from the port of Trabzon. Mr Dink's lawyer, Ergin Cinmen, says there is compelling evidence that the Istanbul police were given warning of a planned attack at least a year ago, but they did nothing to protect Mr Dink. This week Istanbul's Armenians were shocked once again by a letter sent from Trabzon warning them to defend Turkey against the genocide claims or “face the consequences”. It was delivered to an Armenian primary school.

Such threats have dispelled the surge of goodwill that followed a huge turnout at Mr Dink's funeral and the reopening in March of an old Armenian church restored by Turkey's AK government. Etyen Mahcupyan, who replaced Mr Dink at his newspaper, says some of his kin are now talking of leaving Turkey for good. The border may stay closed for many more years.

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.