BY ILTER TURKMEN
HURRIYET- Anything which ends well is good. President Abdullah Gul's visit to Yerevan last week also went well. Nothing unpleasant or excessive happened, and the protests against him weren't widespread. The Armenians who watched the World Cup qualifying match between Turkey and Armenia were very dignified and mature as well. Armenian President Serzh Sarkisian will probably accept Gul's invitation to attend the return match a year from now. But presidential visits to watch soccer matches aren't enough.
I wrote on Saturday that if Gul's visit didn't produce concrete results, it wouldn't be surprising if this provoked domestic political debate. In addition, as Radikal daily's Cengiz Candar wrote, unless the rapprochement represented by the visit is followed by opening diplomatic relations and borders between the two countries, this will result in deep frustration. Candar added that resolving this frustration would be harder than addressing the current problems.
Apparently Gul's visit wasn't just symbolic or pro forma. Armenian Foreign Minister Edward Nalbandian told reporters in Yerevan that after Gul left, he had met with his Turkish counterpart Ali Babacan and that they reached a consensus to work on opening the borders and diplomatic relations between the two countries. This development signals very genuine change in Turkey's stance, because up to now these two steps have been contingent on solving the Karabakh conflict between Azerbaijan and Armenia.
Will these two processes be conducted together, or will Turkish-Armenian relations be discussed in a completely different framework? We don't know exactly, but the Karabakh issue can't be solved so quickly. Linking these two processes would drag out the normalization of Turkish-Armenian relations. Some argue against opening the border and establishing diplomatic relations, saying, for instance, that Armenia hasn't forsaken its territorial claims on Turkey, and that Armenia's declaration of independence and Constitution refer to southern Anatolia as 'Western Armenia.'
If they really include this concrete territorial claim, one might ask why we were one of the first states to recognize Armenia. Another argument cites Armenia's reluctance to ratify the 1921 Treaty of Kars. But here, it would be inexplicable why we didn't insist on recognition of the border before recognizing Armenia.
A few years ago I was a member of the Turkish-Armenian Reconciliation Commission. Before the commission disbanded, the Turkish and Armenian coordinators wrote a letter to the Turkish and Armenian foreign ministers expressing their views on opening the border on the basis of Kars. At that time, the Armenian members didn't think Yerevan would oppose ratifying Kars.
I don't know what happened next, but I guess the main reason for our reluctance to open the border and establishing diplomatic relations comes from not wanting to offend Azerbaijan. Perhaps for the same reason, priority was given to bringing together historians from both sides to improve relations, because such a meeting seemed unlikely to provoke Azerbaijan's direct opposition. It was nearly impossible for historians to agree on a historical interpretation of the events of 1915. Our president's initiative for normal friendly relations between Turkey and Armenia could finally prove that we've started to cast off the restraints which have so far kept us from solving our own problems.