Armenia clings to Turkish peace talks to avert war with Azerbaijan
Erdogan has made it clear that progress in the talks is contingent on progress on Armenia’s negotiations for a peace treaty with Azerbaijan.
Armenia’s Economy Minister Vahan Kerobyan announced that cargo flights from Turkey would start “in the near future,” in line with normalization efforts that resumed early this year following more than a decadelong pause. Kerobyan told a local TV channel this week that once Armenia’s land border with Turkey is opened to trade, Armenia’s economy would grow by 30% in “just two to three years.”
Kerobyan’s bullish comments follow the first substantial steps that were agreed upon during the meeting held in Vienna on July 1 between Armenia’s special envoy for normalization with Turkey Rubin Rubenyan and his Turkish counterpart Serdar Kilic. In that meeting, the parties agreed to open their long-sealed land border to third-country nationals and start the direct transportation of goods between Armenia and Turkey.
Armenia had been pressing Turkey to let diplomatic passport holders through as a first confidence-building measure, but Ankara refused. So Yerevan came up with the idea of allowing those carrying foreign passports to come through, ostensibly to promote cross-border tourism.
The stated objective of the talks launched at the start of this year is to establish full-fledged diplomatic ties and fully open the border. The frontier was shuttered by Turkey in 1993 when Armenia occupied large chunks of Azerbaijan in a bloody war over the Armenian-majority enclave of Nagorno-Karabakh that is internationally recognized as part of Azerbaijan.
