Political scientist Gagik Hambaryan expressed an idea talking about the Armenia-Turkey protocols signed in Zurich on this very day three years ago during a conversation with www.aravot.am that although President Serzh Sargsyan had skillfully used the football diplomacy showing that the Armenian people that had undergone a genocide committed by the Ottoman Empire were ready to normalize their relations with the neighbor without preconditions, not denouncing that document when Turkey hadn’t ratified them was a serious mistake. “Serzh Sargsyan made right calculations, but when those protocols were signed and not ratified by Turkey and our president was stating all the time that if the Turkish government didn’t ratify within a reasonable period of time, we would take back our signature, that taking back the signature should have been done as early as last year, because we have waited for quite a long time and the time is against us. Besides, our president should have remembered that signing these protocols led to worsening the relations between Armenia and the Diaspora. Regardless of the tension with the Diaspora, we were able to prove to the international community that Armenia was ready to improve relations with Turkey, after that we got proof that Turkey was not ready at all to implement and we could have taken our signature back without deepening the controversies between Armenia and the Diaspora, in order that we could have proved to the international community normally,
on time what steps we had taken and what response we had gotten from Turkey and wouldn’t have deepened our controversies with the Diaspora.”
In response to a question of ours whether an ordinary Armenian citizen, besides the Republic of Armenia, was ready to improve his/her relations with Turks, since many of our citizens were revengeful toward them, they demanded respect for their ancestors who had undergone the genocide, the political scientist said, “Not having relations with Turkey for many years, our people treated that state stereotypically in the Soviet times, the very government of Turkey convinced the people that there had not been an Armenian genocide, but at the same time, they didn’t explain where 3 million Armenians were. In many cases, the ordinary Turkish resident of Istanbul, Ankara, Adana or Izmir doesn’t know where Armenians are, they had their opinion that Armenians, betraying the Ottoman Empire during the World War I, had taken sides with their enemy Russian Empire and had fought against the Turkish government. They knew this version too, although let me state that this doesn’t mean at all that the annihilation of a whole nation in its historical motherland is a normal thing. We should get rid of those stereotypes and prove to Turks themselves, the international community that the genocide has happened.”
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In our interlocutor’s opinion, in the age of globalization, there are no problems, which cannot be solved through negotiations. “If we consider the conflicts between neighbors, Germany and France should have never normalized the relations with each other, Bulgaria and Turkey shouldn’t have had normal relations, Romania and Hungary should have always warred against each other and many other versions. As a result of the war between India and Pakistan, there were tensions between the two states, which continue up to now, but it doesn’t mean that there are no diplomatic, trade and economic relations between the neighboring countries. We could establish normal relations with Turkey maintaining our demands to them and their demands to us, but this doesn’t mean that there should be closed borders between the OSCE or UN member states. Armenia and Turkey are members of big international organizations and according to the logic, they shouldn’t have had closed borders, Europe, the US and Russia should make Turkey open the borders with Armenia,” Gagik Hambaryan says. As for what prevented Turkey from taking practical steps toward opening the borders, according to our interlocutor, the main impeding force is Azerbaijan, which although calls itself the younger brother of Turkey, actually acts as the elder sister making Turkey take steps that are mostly not in the interest of the foreign policy of Turkey and generally the region with its whims.
Nune AREVSHATYAN
