No major shift expected in Armenia’s policy after polls

15.05.2007
Today's Zaman
EMİNE KART ANKARA

Analysts and observers have held little hope for a dramatic shift in foreign policy of Turkey's estranged neighbor Armenia following the weekend's parliamentary elections in which pro-presidential parties won a large majority -- and with Yerevan being expected to continue to put worldwide recognition of an alleged Armenian genocide at heart of its foreign policy decision-making mechanism.

The winner of the election -- viewed as a dress rehearsal for the presidential vote due to be held at the beginning of 2008 -- was Prime Minister Serzh Sarksyan, who heads the Republican Party, which will control around 40 percent of the 131 seats in parliament.

Sarksyan, a 52-year-old former welder, is from Nagorno-Karabakh, as is current President Robert Kocharian, a notorious hard-liner. Nagorno-Karabakh is a territory inside Azerbaijan that has been controlled by Armenian and local ethnic Armenian forces since a six-year war that ended in 1994. Tensions remain high between Armenia and Azerbaijan, ex-Soviet republics in the Caucasus. Sarksyan was at Kocharian's side in the separatist administration during the war. For nearly 15 years he has held senior posts in Armenia's government including defense minister and national security minister.

Back in December 2006, in an article that appeared in The Wall Street Journal, then-Defense Minister Sarksyan called on the European Union to become "increasingly involved in finding a way to a breakthrough for relations between Turkey and Armenia."

Armenia, for its part, considers remembering the Armenian "genocide" important, Sarksyan wrote then. But Armenia does not tie "the establishment of diplomatic relations to recognition of the genocide," he suggested at the time.

This very last sentence hinting that Armenia might not be insistent on recognition of an alleged genocide of Anatolian Armenians at the hands of the Ottoman Empire during the World War I for reestablishing diplomatic relations with Ankara could be considered as the sole light of hope regarding the new Armenian government's policy toward Turkey, Utku Kundakçı of the Turkish Economic and Social Studies Foundation's (TESEV) Foreign Policy Program, told Today's Zaman.

Noting that this hope could only be related to the tone and wording of Sarksyan's remarks, Kundakçı, however, cautioned that one should not hold high expectations.

Ankara has recognized Yerevan since the former Soviet republic gained independence in 1991, but nevertheless refuses to set up diplomatic ties because of Armenian efforts to secure international condemnation of the controversial World War I era killings of Anatolian Armenians as genocide. Armenians claim up to 1.5 million of their kin were slaughtered in orchestrated killings during the last years of the Ottoman Empire. Turkey categorically rejects the claims, saying that 300,000 Armenians along with at least as many Turks died in civil strife which emerged when the Armenians took up arms for independence in eastern Anatolia and sided with the Russian troops which were invading Ottoman lands.

In 1993 Turkey also shut its border with Armenia in a show of solidarity with its close ally Azerbaijan, which was at war with Armenia over the Nagorno-Karabakh enclave, dealing a heavy economic blow to the impoverished nation. Ankara wants Armenia to abandon its campaign for the recognition of the killings as genocide and make progress in its dispute with Baku before formal diplomatic relations can be established.

For his part, Kaan Soyak, the co-chairman of the Turkish-Armenian Business Council, noted that participation in the elections stood at 55-57 percent, thus low participation in elections have been widely interpreted as a confirmation of the ongoing status quo. Nevertheless, he still argued that Turkey should take the initiative of unilaterally opening the border with Armenia in order to invalidate hard-liner policies in the neighboring country.

Yet, Sedat Laçiner, head of the Ankara-based International Strategic Research Organization (ISRO/USAK), drew attention to the fact that now those who favor hard-liner policies have been in power and any concession given by Turkey would be used as a tool by those again against Turkey.

"If Turkey makes any concessions such as unilaterally opening borders, then it will be giving a wrong message to both the ruling anti-Turkey camp and those in opposition who favor a more rationalist and softer relationship with Turkey. Then you would be encouraging those hard-liners to keep up with their unacceptable policies, while you'll be harming the moderate camp. Its costs would be heavy."

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.