As the world marked the 60th anniversary of the adoption of the United Nations Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide on December 9, a group of nearly 300 Armenian intellectuals and public figures sent an open letter to Turkish President Abdullah Gul urging him to acknowledge the World War I-era killings of Armenians in the Ottoman Empire as genocide.

“The new situation formed in the South Caucasus as a result of the latest events, the bold step of Armenian President Serzh Sargsyan to invite you to Yerevan and the meeting held reaffirm that establishing good-neighborly relations between Armenia and Turkey requires courageous and realistic solutions. First of all we face the knotty issue of the Armenian Genocide,” the letter said.

In their letter prominent Armenian writers, musicians and artists and other representatives of the intelligentsia say the modern Turkish state is the successor of Ottoman Turkey which was responsible for genocide committed against the Armenian people.

“Your generation of Turkish leaders must accept the undeniable truth and recognize the fact of the Armenian Genocide. We think this is first of all necessary for the Turkish people. Thus it will get rid of the burden of history and will stand with clear conscience next to other states. Only this way it is possible to close this page of history and make bold steps towards the future. Only in that case can there be a sincere dialogue and a process of real reconciliation between our peoples,” the letter emphasized.

Armenia and Turkey have seen a dramatic thaw in their historically strained relations in the past several months driven by the so-called ‘soccer diplomacy’ when President Sargsyan in September invited his counterpart Gul to Yerevan to watch together a World Cup qualifier between the two countries’ national soccer teams.

Gul’s visit was followed by a series of meetings between representatives of the two states that have a closed border and no diplomatic relations. Negotiations over future relations in particular have been conducted by the two countries’ foreign ministers.

As many as 135 countries, including Turkey, have so far signed the United Nations genocide convention.

The successive governments in Ankara, however, have strongly denied that the killings and deportations of Armenians at the beginning of the 20th century constituted genocide.

Pakrat Estukian, the editor of the Istanbul-based bilingual (Armenian-Turkish) newspaper, Agos, said visiting Yerevan this week that the collection of signatures to the petition of a group of Turkish intellectuals (who on December 5 publicly apologized for what they described as a “great disaster” that befell the Ottoman Empire’s Armenian minority and urged their fellow Turks to follow suit) would be continued for a year. According to him, each of the signatories of the petition had been under no pressure to take the step, which they made only “listening to the voice of their conscience.”