Opinion Sur Joven

Edward Nalbandian, Minister of Foreign Affairs of Armenia, was not convinced about the speech that Ahmet Davutoglu, his Turkish counterpart, was planning to read after signing the protocols. Apparently, he asked Mr. Davotoglu to leave one of the paragraphs out, but he did not accept. When the United States Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton heard about this, she immediately returned to the hotel where Nalbandian was staying. After telephone conversations with Mr. Davotoglu and negotiations with the Armenian Minister, they finally reached an agreement and cancelled their respective speeches. In eighteen minutes they signed the protocols, shook hands and left in their respective ways.

This is how Armenia and Turkey resumed diplomatic relations last October 10th after 16 years of estrangement. Although some people took this news as a positive sign, a vast majority in both countries were reluctant in the face of improving relations between the two countries.

This is mainly because of two of the terms hammered out in the treaty. One of them is the agreement to establish a mixed committee of historians “to discuss and reach an agreement about historical events”. That is to say, to investigate if the Armenian genocide carried out by the Ottoman Empire did in fact take place at the beginning of the 20th Century, being this an insult not only to the Armenian people and their diaspora, who openly disagree with the signing of the protocols, but also to the international organisms and states that have already acknowledged the Armenian Genocide. Mr. Serge Sarkissian, President of Armenia, said that “restoring relations with the Turkish does not mean to question the Armenian Genocide”.

To put it in other words: what would the world think if Germany would not have acknowledged the Holocaust that took place during the Nazi government and now would sign a treaty with Israel which recognized its existence? That would be ridiculous and would represent lots of complaints, moreover, International Law would react against the protocols.

Historically, denial has led to impunity. “Does anybody remember the Armenian genocide nowadays?, asked Hitler to his ministers to convince them that a mass killing could be carried out with no political costs.

Yet attempting to understand, how could the Turkish proposal be taken seriously when Section 301 of its Penal Code states that “Public defamation of the Government of the Republic of Turkey, the judicial institutions of the State, the military or security structures shall be punishable by imprisonment”. In other words, it is allowed to imprison anyone expressing himself publicly by claiming the acknowledgement of the Armenian genocide. This was what happened to Nobel Prize winner Orham Pamuk and to the Turkish journalist Hrant Dink, shot and murdered in 2007 by a young nationalist who is still free despite his confession to the crime.

The second controversial term of the protocols concerns the “mutual acknowledgement of existing borders”. In practical terms, that means that Erevan will have to give up the retrieval of historical territories and as well as the formal acceptance of the borders set by the the Kars Treaty (1921), in which Turkey’s eastern borders were established without the participation of Armenia as an international right-bearing subject, but as part of the Soviet Union.

Another risk regarding territory for Armenia that is not explicitly written in the signed agreement but that is publicly declared by the Turkish authorities is the withdrawal of Armenian troops from Nagorno Karabagh. It was over this territory that Armenia unilaterally decided to close its borders in 1993, after a six-year war between Armenia and Azerbaijan that finished with the independence of this territory, although still not internationally recognized, which is inhabited by Armenians but located in Azeri territory.

In an interview conducted by the Azeri agency Trend in September, Turkish Premier Recep Tayyip Erdogan declared that “borders will be open only after the liberation of the occupied territories of Azerbaijan”, “Reaching an agreement will depend on the resolution of the Karabagh conflict”. The Turkish pro-government members of the Parliament also said that the opening of the borders will be complicated if they cannot make some progress on this subject.