Türkiye welcomed Azerbaijan and Armenia’s agreement to take confidence-building measures, expressing a desire for an imminent peace deal in move toward normalization after decades of tension Friday.

“We support the decision to continue negotiations for the adoption of additional confidence-building measures,” a Turkish Foreign Ministry statement said.

“We wish for the prompt signing of the peace agreement between Azerbaijan and Armenia, which will constitute one of the most crucial developments for establishing permanent peace and stability in the South Caucasus,” it added.

The South Caucasus neighbors have been locked in a decadeslong conflict over the control of the Karabakh region, which Azerbaijan reclaimed after a lightning operation against illegal separatists in September.

Azerbaijan, with Türkiye lending its support, liberated most of the Karabakh region from Armenian occupation during 44 days of clashes in the fall of 2020, which ended with a Russian-brokered peace agreement, opening the door to normalization.

Azerbaijan sent troops to Karabakh on Sept. 19, and after just one day of fighting, Armenian separatist forces aided down arms and agreed to reintegrate with Baku.

Both countries have said a peace agreement could be signed by the end of the year, but peace talks – mediated separately by the European Union, the United States and Russia – have seen little progress.

Azerbaijan and Armenia announced late Thursday that they agreed to release detainees in a step toward peace.

“Armenia and Azerbaijan believe there is a historical chance to achieve a long-awaited peace in the region. Two countries reconfirm their intention to normalize relations and to reach the peace treaty based on respect for the principles of sovereignty and territorial integrity,” according to the statement.

As part of the agreement on taking “tangible steps” toward building confidence, Azerbaijan released 32 Armenian soldiers in exchange for two Azerbaijani soldiers “as driven by values of humanism and as a gesture of goodwill.”

A joint statement by the countries also said Armenia agreed to lift its objections to Azerbaijan hosting next year’s international conference on climate change, the COP29.

The E.U. and the U.S., too, praised the agreement as a breakthrough, with European Council president Charles Michel welcoming an “unprecedented opening in political dialogue.”

Russia also voiced support with the pair’s move of “confirming the mutual intention to normalize relations and conclude a peace treaty.”

Source: Daily Sabah

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Turkey has closed its airspace to flights by Armenian aircraft in retaliation for the erection of a monument in the Armenian capital that Ankara says honors people responsible for the killings of Turkish officials, Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu said Wednesday.

In an interview with NTV television, Cavusoglu warned that Turkey would take further measures if the monument in Yerevan is not removed.

The move comes as Turkey and Armenia, which have no diplomatic relations, had been engaged in talks to normalize ties and put decades of acrimony behind. They appointed special envoys who have held several rounds of talks. Their discussions had resulted in an agreement to resume charter flights between Istanbul and Yerevan.

The two countries have a more than century-old bitter relationship over the deaths of an estimated 1.5 million Armenians in massacres, deportations and forced marches that began in 1915 in Ottoman Turkey.

Historians widely view the event as genocide. Turkey vehemently rejects the label, conceding that many died in that era but insisting that the death toll is inflated and the deaths resulted from civil unrest.

Cavusoglu said the monument aimed “to glorify” Armenians involved in plans to assassinate Ottoman and Azerbaijani officials in the 1920s and Turkish diplomats in the 1970s and 1980s.

“It is not possible for us to accept this. We can clearly see that their intentions are not good,” Cavusoglu said.

The monument is dedicated to members of “Operation Nemesis” — the codename for a covert operation to avenge the killing and deportation of Armenians by Ottoman Empire forces, with seven assassinations carried out by the Armenian Revolutionary Federation between 1920 and 1922.

Operation Nemesis represented “a record of the fact that throughout history, crimes do not go unpunished regardless of how the international community treats it,” Yerevan Deputy Mayor Tigran Avinyan told state news agency Armenpress on the April 25 unveiling of the monument, on which the names of 16 Operation Nemesis members are engraved.

Armenia’s central aviation committee claimed that it didn’t receive official notification from the Turkish side about the airspace closure.

Turkey shut down its border with Armenia in 1993, in a show of solidarity with its close ally Azerbaijan, which was locked in a conflict with Armenia over the Nagorno-Karabakh region.

In 2020, Turkey strongly backed Azerbaijan in the six-week conflict with Armenia over Nagorno-Karabakh, which ended with a Russia-brokered peace deal that saw Azerbaijan gain control of a significant part of the region.

Meanwhile, Armenian parliamentary president Alen Simonyan arrived in Ankara on Wednesday to attend the 30th anniversary of the Parliamentary Assembly of the Black Sea Economic Cooperation. According to Simonyan’s press secretary, the parliamentary president is set to also meet with the president of the Turkish parliament.

Source: AP News

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The episode appears to be a setback for the rapprochment process between the two countries that had been advancing, if unevenly.

Turkey’s foreign minister has said the country closed its airspace to Armenian flights in response to a new monument that was erected in Yerevan commemorating a program to assassinate perpetrators of the Armenian genocide.

The monument “glorifies terrorists,” Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu said in an interview with NTV television on May 3. “In connection with this we closed our airspace for Armenian planes.”

It isn’t clear which Armenian planes are affected. One Armenian airline, Flyone, reported on April 29 that a flight from Paris to Yerevan was forced to land in Moldova because it was unexpectedly refused permission to use Turkish airspace.

“For reasons incomprehensible to us and without any visible grounds, the Turkish aviation authorities canceled the permission previously granted to the Flyone Armenia airline to operate flights to Europe through the Turkish airspace,” the chairman of the airline’s board, Aram Ananyan, told the news agency Armenpress at the time.

Ananyan further explained to RFE/RL that the extent of the ban wasn’t clear, but that it didn’t appear to apply to the Flyone flights between Istanbul and Yerevan. The flight tracking website FlightRadar24 indicated that those flights have operated normally for the last several days. Armenia’s General Department of Civil Aviation did not respond to a query from Eurasianet by press time.

The ban comes while Armenia and Turkey are pursuing a fitful process of rapprochement, three decades after Turkey broke off relations during the first war between Armenia and Azerbaijan.

Ankara and Yerevan have reached tentative agreements to reopen their land border to third-country nationals; Armenian officials say it could happen by this year’s tourist season. The rapprochement process appeared to get a boost following the massive earthquake in southern Turkey in February: Armenia sent a rescue team and Foreign Minister Ararat Mirzoyan visited them and Cavusoglu. Cavusoglu thanked Armenia for “extending a hand of friendship” and hopes were raised that out of the disaster, better relations might result.

But the process now appears to have taken a step backwards.

Cavusoglu suggested that Armenian officials he spoke with had tried to distance themselves from the monument, but that he didn’t believe them.

“They [his Armenian interlocutors] say that it was the mayor’s office who put up the monument, that they are not under our control. I think this statement doesn’t correspond to reality, they are not demonstrating good will,” he said in the interview.

“If they continue in this spirit we will have to take additional measures,” he said.

The monument was inaugurated on April 25, the day after Armenians traditionally commemorate the genocide. It is dedicated to Operation Nemesis, the effort in the late 1910s and early 1920s by Armenian militants to assassinate Ottoman officials responsible for the Armenian genocide a few years earlier. Up to one and a half million Armenians were killed in the genocide.

Turkey continues to deny that the killings amounted to a genocide, and following the erection of the monument the foreign ministry issued a statement objecting to it.

The monument is “incompatible with the spirit of the normalization process between Türkiye and Armenia, will in no way contribute to the efforts for establishment of lasting and sustainable peace and stability in the region. On the contrary, they will negatively affect the normalization process.”

While the Turkey-Armenia process has appeared to be on the back burner in recent months, relations between Armenia and Turkey’s ally, Azerbaijan, have been much more eventful. Negotiations between Yerevan and Baku are intensifying even as the situation on the ground in Karabakh, the territory at the heart of the conflict, gets more tense. On April 23, Azerbaijan established a border post on the only road connecting Armenia to Karabakh, and pro-government media have been increasingly openly celebrating that it could lead Armenians to flee the territory.

It has raised the specter of another round of ethnic cleansing in the region; after Armenia’s victory in the first war between the two sides in the 1990s, over 600,000 Azerbaijanis were forced to flee the territory Armenian forces occupied.

The threat of Armenians now being forced out of Karabakh hung heavily over this year’s genocide commemoration events.

Operation Nemesis represented “a record of the fact that throughout history, crimes do not go unpunished regardless of how the international community treats it,” Yerevan Deputy Mayor Tigran Avinyan said at the monument’s inauguration ceremony, Armenpress reported. “What Nemesis did was understandable for everyone, it was fair for everyone, but our goal should be to prevent possible crimes, to create mechanisms to bring criminals to justice. That should be our main message.”

The Turkish foreign ministry statement also hinted at the Azerbaijan-Armenia process, noting that Operation Nemesis also had targeted “Azerbaijani officials of the time.”

The speaker of Armenia’s parliament, Alen Simonyan, was scheduled to travel to Ankara on May 3 to attend a meeting of the Black Sea Economic Cooperation Parliamentary Assembly, a regional body based in Turkey of which Armenia is a member. In his comments, Cavusoglu said Turkish authorities were making an exception for the plane Simonyan was traveling on.

Source: Eurasianet

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At the session of the Parliamentary Assembly of the Black Sea Economic Cooperation, the members of the Armenian delegation raised the issue of the blockade of the Lachin Corridor, emphasized the danger of the genocide of the Armenians of Nagorno-Karabakh by Azerbaijan, ARMENPRESS was informed from the parliament of Armenia.

The MPs presented what work they carried out within the framework of the session of the PA.

The focus of the agenda was the role of parliamentary diplomacy in the dynamics of global change. Reports on different topics were made by different countries.

The focus of the agenda was the role of parliamentary diplomacy in the dynamics of global transformations. Reports on different topics were made by different countries.

“First, I reflected on the blockade of the Lachin Corridor, the recent events, the installation of a checkpoint and I called on Azerbaijan to respect the statement signed by them on November 9, to which, of course, they reacted furiously,” said Babken Tunyan, the head of the Armenian delegation.

During the session, Gevorg Papoyan stressed that Azerbaijan has illegally blockaded Artsakh and Artsakh Armenians.

“I emphasized that these people are now facing many social problems, there is a shortage of medicine and food. And there, in fact, there is a danger of genocide. And, of course, Azerbaijan is the first to blame and responsible for this,” said Papoyan.

“I emphasized that these people are now facing many social problems, there is a shortage of medicine and food. And there, in fact, there is a danger of genocide. And, of course, Azerbaijan is the first to blame and responsible for this,” said Papoyan.

The members of the parliamentary delegation of Armenia also sent an admonition to the Secretary General, Azerbaijani citizen Asaf Hajiyev, who, being an international civil servant, violated the principle of political neutrality.

Babken Tunyan informed that recently, using the organization’s social network platforms, he made one-sided statements. Speaking as an official in an interview with the Turkish media, he made inadmissible remarks against Armenia and several other countries, threatening to use force.

“We gave the last warning. We called on him not only to remove these publications, but also to never try to make such expressions in the future,” Tunyan said.

Source: Armen Press

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