Armenia and Turkey have never formally established diplomatic relations and their shared border has been closed since the 1990s
Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan had a rare phone conversation with Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan today, the press service of the Armenian presidency announced today, as the two countries signaled their desire for a rapprochement despite historic tensions.
Armenia and Turkey have never formally established diplomatic relations, and their shared borders have been closed since the 1990s.
Their relations were soured by the World War II massacres of Armenians by the Ottoman Empire, the forerunner of modern Turkey, which Yerevan and many countries call genocide, a term Ankara rejects.
Pashinyan and Erdogan “discussed the process of normalization of bilateral relations,” according to a statement from the Armenian government’s press service.
Turkey’s Anadolu news agency reported that the Turkish president told the Armenian prime minister today that confidence-building measures to normalize relations between Ankara and Yerevan should continue. According to the announcement of the Directorate of Communications of Turkey, Pashinyan in a telephone conversation congratulated Erdogan and the Turkish people on the occasion of the Muslim religious holiday ‘Eid al-‘Adha (The Feast of Sacrifice). The Turkish president, for his part, wished that this celebration would bring peace and prosperity to all humanity.
Pashinyan, one of the first leaders to congratulate the Turkish president in late May on his re-election, attended Erdogan’s swearing-in ceremony in Turkey in early June.
Turkey, which emerged from the breakup of the Ottoman Empire in 1920, recognizes the massacres but rejects the term genocide, citing a civil war in Anatolia, combined with a famine, when 300,000 to 500,000 Armenians and as many Turks died.
Turkey is also the main supporter of Azerbaijan, a neighbor and historical rival of Armenia. Baku and Yerevan have fought two wars over control of the Nagorno-Karabakh enclave, one that erupted with the collapse of the Soviet Union in the 1990s and the other in the 2000s.
In December 2021, Armenia and Turkey appointed envoys to normalize their relations, a will the two countries had already expressed in 2009 by signing a relevant agreement.
Armenia, however, never ratified this agreement and withdrew from the process in 2018.
Source :Skai
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