Erdoğan set to have crucial Armenia talks in Washington

Erdoğan will be accompanied by Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoğlu and Energy Minister Taner Yıldız during US President Barack Obama’s 47-country Nuclear Security Summit (NSS).

Obama, a staunch supporter of Turkish-Armenian efforts to normalize their relations, will have bilateral talks with Armenian President Serzh Sarksyan, while Erdoğan will also have separate bilateral talks with Sarksyan on the sidelines of the meeting. Although no exact time or venue has been set for a meeting between Erdoğan and Obama, Turkish officials told Today’s Zaman on Friday that such a meeting was likely to take place.

As for a trilateral meeting between Erdoğan, Obama and Sarskyan, the same officials said Ankara wants to see the outcome of a Friday visit to the Azerbaijani capital of Baku by Foreign Ministry Undersecretary Ambassador Feridun Sinirlioğlu before attempting to schedule such a meeting.

Armenia and Turkey signed accords in October of last year designed to overcome the legacy of the World War I killings of Anatolian Armenians under the Ottoman Empire. Last week, Erdoğan said Turkey was returning its ambassador to the United States, having withdrawn him a month earlier in protest against a US congressional committee labeling the killings as genocide.

Addressing a news conference in Ankara on Thursday, Foreign Minister Davutoğlu made no mention of the coming meeting in Washington but said he believed the two countries would soon overcome their difficulties. “In the following weeks, we hope to normalize Turkish-Armenian relations by pursuing the process in the right direction and in its own nature,” Davutoğlu said.

Under the accords, Armenia and Turkey agreed to establish diplomatic ties and open the border within two months of parliamentary approval. But the atmosphere has soured in the past few months, raising doubt over when they would be ratified. Sarksyan said recently that the Armenian Parliament would ratify the accords just after the Turkish Parliament.

The deal would bring big economic gains to poor, landlocked Armenia. Turkey would burnish its credentials as a potential EU entry state and boost its clout in the South Caucasus, a region crisscrossed by pipelines carrying oil and gas to the West.

Consultations in Baku ahead of Washington talks

The protocols face opposition from Turkey’s fellow-Muslim ally Azerbaijan, which wants to see progress over its breakaway region of Nagorno-Karabakh. Azerbaijan, an oil and gas exporter, lost control over Nagorno-Karabakh when Christian ethnic Armenians backed by Armenia broke away as the Soviet Union collapsed.

Ambassador Sinirlioğlu went to Baku on Friday following his talks in Yerevan on Wednesday. He traveled to the Armenian capital as Erdoğan’s special envoy and met with Sarksyan. Erdoğan also sent a letter to Sarksyan containing a message that an agreement would better serve the interests of the two countries, especially when compared to the cost of failure to achieve peace.

Following Sinirlioğlu’s visit to Yerevan, the need to pay a visit to the Azerbaijani capital emerged, diplomatic sources, speaking on condition of anonymity, told Today’s Zaman.

In Baku, Sinirlioğlu met with Azerbaijani Foreign Minister Elmar Mammadyarov before his meeting with Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev. In addition to conveying his assessments of the Armenian capital and the signals he received from the Armenian side to Azerbaijani officials, Sinirlioğlu was expected to “test the waters” in the Azerbaijani capital ahead of the summit in Washington as Ankara doesn’t want Baku to feel “excluded” due to the fact that no Azerbaijani official will be attending the summit, diplomatic sources said. Ankara will decide whether to attempt to organize a trilateral meeting among Armenian, US and Turkish leaders according to the signals it receives from Baku.

The same sources highlighted that Azerbaijan was not invited to the nuclear summit even though Armenia was invited. Although Washington said the invitations were sent based on “certain mechanical criteria,” Ankara conveyed its uneasiness to Washington at the highest level over the absence of an invitation to Baku, the sources said.

In a recent interview with Reuters, Deputy Prime Minister Cemil Çiçek once more made the government’s position on the issue clear, saying Turkey wants Armenian forces in Nagorno-Karabakh to pull back from the front lines. It also wants Armenia to correct a ruling by its constitutional court, which in January had endorsed the protocols but added that the state had a duty to pursue the international recognition of the killings of Armenians in 1915 as genocide.