30 September 2008
TRANSITIONS ONLINE
by Timothy Spence

There are positive signs in the budding relationship between Armenia and Turkey. But don’t expect too much too soon.

When representatives of the NATO Euro-Atlantic Partnership Council gather this week in Armenia’s capital to discuss energy security, much of the focus is likely to be on the country’s own highly combustible neighborhood.

Russia’s rapid defeat of Georgia, its assertiveness in securing energy deals with its old Soviet allies, and Armenia’s unresolved territorial dispute with petroleum-rich Azerbaijan have triggered growing skepticism about the South Caucasus being the preferred transit corridor in Europe’s quest for Caspian Sea oil and gas. The region looks more and more like a potholed country road rather than a bypass around Russia.

But the 50-nation seminar scheduled in Yerevan on 2-3 October will also take place amid promising political developments between Armenia and Turkey. In a flurry of activity in recent weeks, the longtime adversaries have taken steps to patch up relations and possibly open their borders to trade after years of isolation and bitterness.

A reduction in tensions would improve chances for advancing peace talks between Armenia and Turkey’s ally Azerbaijan. “It could change the game in that region,” said Shamil Yenikeyeff, an analyst at Britain’s Oxford Energy Institute who was among those invited to the Yerevan energy security meeting.

A seminal moment for Armenia and Turkey came this summer when Armenian President Serzh Sargsyan invited his Turkish counterpart to Yerevan for the 6 September match between the nations’ football teams – an invitation criticized by some of Sargsyan’s allies, including his predecessor, Robert Kocharian. Turkey’s Abdullah Gul accepted. The meetings of the two teams and the two leaders were unprecedented.

‘THE TIME HAS COME’

The weeks since have seen discussions of energy and trade cooperation, re-opening transit corridors, and even an end to Turkey’s embargo of Armenia, unthinkable only a few months ago.

Sargsyan told the UN General Assembly on 25 September that the two leaders discussed an array of issues. “The most important was our decision not to leave the current problems to the future generations. I am confident that the time has come to solve Armenian-Turkish problems, and on that issue I observed similar determination on behalf of President Gul.”

Last weekend, foreign ministers of Turkey, Azerbaijan, and Armenia met on the sidelines of the UN General Assembly session, and leaders of all three countries have acknowledged that the Georgia crisis makes resolving their own differences all the more urgent.

In recent days, Gul told Turkish newspapers that the country should not rule out lifting the embargo it imposed on Armenia in 1993 for its support of ethnic-Armenian separatists in Azerbaijan’s Nagorno-Karabakh region. The embargo has forced Armenia to rely heavily on Russia for trade and energy supplies, much of it shipped through Georgia, and Armenia has increasingly turned to Iran for energy and trade deals.

Armenia and its giant neighbor may be talking, but major differences remain and hardliners in both countries have criticized any normalization of relations until their demands are met.

A first step to normalization would require Turkey to acknowledge the slaughter and starvation of more than 1 million Armenians that occurred in the final years of the Ottoman Empire. Turkey’s long-standing position has been that the modern republic cannot be held responsible for the actions of its crumbling predecessor. And it has been less than diplomatic with countries that have urged Ankara to fess up to the atrocities committed by the Ottomans.

A year ago, Ankara recalled its ambassador to the United States over a congressional resolution labeling as genocide the mass killings of Armenians by the Ottomans. Turkey took similar actions in 2006 with Canada and France.

For their part, the Turks have insisted that Armenia end its occupation of parts of Azerbaijan and restore Nagorno-Karabakh to Azeri sovereignty. Turkey’s Azeri allies have also sought the repatriation of nearly 1 million people who were displaced from Karabakh and nearby areas by fighting that erupted when it was still an autonomous region within Soviet Azerbaijan.

An uncomfortable status quo has existed for more than a decade, with Armenia boxed in on two sides, Karabakh declaring itself an independent republic supported only by Armenia, and Azerbaijan demanding a return of its territory.

WARTIME URGENCY

It was the urgency of the Georgian crisis that may have accelerated the developments in relations between Armenia and Turkey. Turkey, which has championed closer cooperation among Black Sea states, including Russia, led a flurry of diplomatic activity in the Caucasus after the August war in Georgia and called for a Caucasus Stability and Cooperation Platform involving Armenia, Azerbaijan, Georgia, and Russia. “All parties concerned seem receptive to the idea, and we hope they will give it a chance to work,” Gul told the UN General Assembly on 23 September.

Armenia, meanwhile, depends heavily on Russian imports that come through Georgia and feared that it would be cut off from its main supply routes. After the hostilities began in South Ossetia, Yerevan appealed to the Kremlin not to halt natural gas exports through a Gazprom pipeline that supplies both Georgia and Armenia. Yerevan also urged Moscow not to blockade transit routes and the Black Sea ports that Armenia uses for trade.

Even before the conflict and the football match, however, there were telltale signs of a thaw. After being elected in February, amid increasingly violent protests from Armenian opposition parties, Sargsyan received a congratulatory letter from an unusual address – the Turkish president’s office. Gul’s letter expressed hope that “an atmosphere based on reciprocal trust and cooperation can be established that will contribute to regional peace and prosperity."

Business groups on both sides have sought to ease the embargo and open the door to trade across a border that is still guarded by Russian troops, at Armenia’s invitation. An end to the blockade, a settlement of the conflict with Azerbaijan, and the demilitarization of Armenia’s east and west borders could be a boon to all three countries.

A European Parliament report in 2007 noted that re-establishing rail and other transport connections would give Turkey an important direct route to markets in Azerbaijan and Central Asia. Armenia would immediately gain from trade that now filters through Georgia. A re-opening of borders, the report said, would also help bring opportunity and stability to eastern Anatolia, where the Kurdish separatist movement PKK makes its home.

Some energy analysts also see benefits in reopening these borders if Georgia’s future remains uncertain. Rebuilding neglected, Soviet-era rail links would offer alternative routes for petroleum products that must now pass through Georgia. An attack on a railway bridge west of Tbilisi in mid-August left Azerbaijan’s state-run oil company unable to send the 140,000 barrels of oil it ships daily to Black Sea ports overland through Georgia.

Still, these prospects remain distant. Both Azerbaijan and Turkey have insisted that Armenia respect the territorial integrity of Azerbaijan and a UN resolution to that effect. Armenia’s backing for Nagorno-Karabakh – like Russia’s recognition of Georgia’s breakaway South Ossetia and Abkhazia – has little international support but is an important rallying cry for stubborn nationalists.

“I don’t see that moving toward any conclusion anytime soon,” Julia Nanay, head of the Russia and Caspian service at the advisory firm PFC Energy in Washington, said of the frozen conflict between Armenia and Azerbaijan.

ARMS RACE

Armenia and Azerbaijan also have been locked in an arms race that conflict monitors like the Brussels-based International Crisis Group fear is a precursor to renewed fighting after more than a decade of brittle peace. Drawing on the windfall from export revenues that reached $21.3 billion in 2007, much of it from oil and gas shipments, Azerbaijan’s president, Ilham Aliev, has boosted military spending from $150 million when he took office in 2003 to more than $1.3 billion this year. In the run-up to the presidential election on 15 October, Aliev has called for a further 50 percent increase in military spending. Armenian leaders have responded with double-digit rate increases, but the poorer and smaller nation’s defense budget is less than one-third its neighbor’s.

In his UN address last month, Sargsyan – without naming Azerbaijan directly – accused the country of violating the 13-year-old Karabakh cease-fire. “If any country increases its military budget and brags about it, if limitation on weapons stipulated by the international agreements are being violated and done so openly, if a country signed a cease-fire agreement, which constitutes an international responsibility, but on any occasion threatens to resume military actions, it must receive a rapid and firm response.”

Better relations with Turkey and more direct Turkish involvement in settling the conflict could help. But some analysts doubt that much is going to happen anytime soon. Russia’s recognition of Abkhazia and South Ossetia could embolden both sides – Armenia’s defense of ethnic kin in Nagorno-Karabakh, and the Azerbaijan-Turkish position that the borders of sovereign states should be protected – and only prolong the stalemate.

And then there’s Russia, the newly assertive force in the region. Despite the Kremlin’s commitment to resolving the Karabakh issue through a negotiated settlement, Svante Cornell, research director at the Central Asia-Caucasus Institute in Stockholm, said the Kremlin would look askance at any serious rapprochement between Yerevan and its neighbors because it would end Russia’s domination of Armenia. “I don’t see this going anywhere,” he said.

Timothy Spence, former managing editor of TOL, is a Prague-based free-lance journalist and journalism lecturer