Despite the now common term ‘football diplomacy’, the Armenian-Turkish relations more resemble a volleyball pitch.
The existing border that separates the two countries is like a volleyball net with the teams from each side of it trying to attack. The initiative switches from one team to another; however, on the whole the Turks seem more aggressive.
Practically every week the Turkish diplomatic team makes statements on what impossible task it is to establish diplomatic relations between Ankara and Yerevan without settling the Karabakh issue through recognition of Azerbaijan’s territorial integrity.
Last week such a standpoint took shape of a book published by the Turkish government titled “Karabakh in Ottoman documents”.
This 700-page book is published by the State Depository Department of the Turkish government and pursues the purpose of ‘proving’ that still in Ottoman archives Nagorno-Karabakh was mentioned as part of Azerbaijan.
The authors of the book deliberately overlook the fact that up until 1918 the name ‘Azerbaijan’ as a state formation had not existed at all. Nonetheless, as the Turkish newspaper Zaman reports, “the publication of the book has become an important gesture towards Azerbaijan.”
The Armenian side riposted through a newspaper as well. “Ankara should not condition the process of normalization of its relations with Yerevan by the Karabakh settlement,” stated Armenian Foreign Minister Eduard Nalbandyan in his interview to the Japanese newspaper Yomiuri.
“Ankara and Yerevan have agreed to establish diplomatic relations without preconditions, however, we intend to continue to advocate the recognition of the Armenian Genocide of 1915 in Ottoman Turkey,” stressed Nalbandyan.
The Turks were quick to respond.
Turkish Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoglu called upon the Armenians to forget about their pain and their history in order to build a “bright future”.
“Turkey wants to establish good neighborly relations with all, and in this context I am telling Armenians living in different corners of the world that we want to establish good relations with all Armenians,” said the Turkish minister. “But if everybody starts talking about their pain and history, we will not be able to build peace and future together. Give up your one-sided historic propaganda. I, too, know the pain of my grandfathers.”
Speaking about the Armenian blockade, Davutoglu stated: “Turkey is against any blockade in the region, however, Armenia seized Azerbaijan’s lands and evicted people; it was in this view that our blockade was imposed”.
Garegin Gabrielyan, a political analyst at the Keni analytical center, has commented on this position of the Turkish authorities.
“International structures went into raptures about the signing of the Armenian-Turkish protocols on October 10. However, it is a humiliating – first of all for Turkey and the whole international community – document, because modern history knows more civilized ways of settling disputes. In the current highlight of implanting the tough vector “forget the past and look ahead to the future” into the Armenian mind, modern Germany’s position to the same kind of the ‘Jewish issue’ looks more considered and natural.”
The political analyst believes that one thing that should always be kept in mind is that the essential condition in recovering trust between Germany and Israel was that Chancellor Conrad Adenauer voiced Germany’s official rupture from its nationalist-socialist past, admitting the Holocaust and its guilt for what had been done.
“That is not happening in Turkey, though,” says Gabrielyan.
He reminds that yet in 1952 in Luxemburg the first agreement on providing financial compensation to the refugees for settling in Israel was signed, the first 90 billion Deutsche marks were paid, but even despite all that diplomatic relations between the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG) and Israel were established only in 1965.
Practically all the subsequent leaders of Germany took a tactful and considerate stand: in December 1970 the whole world saw Chancellor Willie Brandt’s photograph where he was kneeling before the famous memorial at the former Warsaw ghetto.
On June 6, 2000, the Bundestag passed a law on creating the Memory/Responsibility/Future Foundation initiated by the then German Chancellor Gerhard Schroder and Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer.
“Hence, the German authorities make it clear that in the civilized world the perception of future is impossible without acknowledging the past, whereas the Turkish government is making statements on the need to forget the past,” says Gabrielyan. “Apparently, it takes breeding Goethe and Schiller and not yataghan in order to reach the level of ‘German understanding’.”
“The international community standing up for the fast and fair settlement of the disputes in the region had better export some civilized ways of settling issues to Azerbaijan and Turkey rather than enthusiastically approve the protocols signed,” concludes Gabrielyan.
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