Epress.am News from Armenia
On Apr. 27, Epress.am sent a letter containing 6 questions to chief editor of local daily Haykakan Jamanak (“Armenian Times”), imprisoned journalist Nikol Pashinyan, as part of a campaign initiated by local news outlets. On May 10, we received Pashinyan’s response to us. We published his response to each of our questions incrementally throughout the week. This is the sixth and final response in this series.
Question: What is your opinion on the prospects of developing relations between Armenia and Turkey? Do you believe that Ankara’s recognition of the Armenian Genocide has to be a precondition in opening the Armenia-Turkey border?
Response: [Armenian President] Serzh Sargsyan also brought the normalization of Armenian-Turkish relations to a deadlock. To now say that Armenian-Turkish relations have to be normalized without preconditions — it sounds somehow not appropriate.
As a result of Sargsyan’s Football Diplomacy, Turkey was able to turn its precondition — to return the territories adjacent to Nagorno-Karabakh to Azerbaijan — into an issue in international discussions and of Turkey’s diplomacy agenda.
Armenia’s reaction that, aha, the entire world found out that Turkey’s setting a precondition and is hindering the normalization of Armenian-Turkish relations seems a bit childish. And so, the world found out. What then? Turkey doesn’t even hide this fact because it can stand on its own.
Our hopes, that the world will answer Turkey’s position with processions of Armenian Genocide recognition, didn’t realize. The US tried this lever through Sweden, but Turkey’s fierce resistance to the international community stopped it from continuing. Realpolitik did its work. So it was that with a paper bucket, with the burden of a domestic political crisis, and thrown into the vortex of a geopolitical game, for the sake of appearing on Euronews, Sargsyan also complicated international recognition of the Armenian Genocide because Turkey obtained a new argument — that as if international recognition of the Genocide will complicate the already complicated Armenian-Turkish relations or will fail efforts to establish relations. Football Diplomacy further entangled the complex junction of the Karabakh conflict.
In the Armenian-Turkish context, Armenia has fallen into a trap: it can neither go forward nor back. I myself, for example, see only one way out of this situation. A new representative, that is, a new president of Armenia at the negotiating table, who will be free from his predecessor’s ensnarled traps.
As for the option of Armenia putting forth to Turkey the precondition of genocide recognition, that will further deepen the deadlock. Turkey closed the Armenia-Turkey border and Turkey is refusing to open it. It’s sort of not logical for us to put forth a precondition to Turkey for it to do that which even without a precondition it’s not doing. This is simply a waste of time. It’s much better for Armenia to encourage organizations engaged in international Genocide recognition and attempt this way to overcome the obstacles on the road to recognition. Genocide recognition is an issue for not the Armenian-Turkish, but the global political agenda. The world must recognize the Armenian Genocide, regardless of how Armenian-Turkish relations are. If Turkey opens the border with Armenia today, will that which happened in 1915 carry any changes? Of course not. Recognizing genocides is an effective move aimed at preventing new genocides and not a diplomatic trade issue.