It’s taken only 94 years to make peace. It might have taken much longer. The talks between Turkey and Armenia about whether they can manage something like normal relations are probably more symbol than substance. But they represent a gesture that might easily not have been made, particularly by Turkey. They are an unexpected step towards calm from the tense borderlands between Europe and Central Asia.
They will have an effect in the US, too, where the clash between Armenia and Turkey has played to a nationwide, passionate audience, from Congress to the singer Cher (who is Armenian). In Europe it might seem like a far-off dispute; in the US it is intimate, eating up congressional debates and national airtime.
Even in the European Union it will have an impact greater than this week’s tentative moves suggest. It will ease Turkey’s relations with the EU after several years of friction.
Yet the steps, so far, are small. On Monday the two said that they would sign a pact within weeks to talk about resuming ties, although that hurdle would need approval by both parliaments. If they get that far, it would end nearly a century of animosity that stems from the killing of as many as 1.5 million Armenians under the Ottoman Empire in 1915, during the First World War. Armenia calls it genocide and wants an admission and an apology. Turkey maintains that many were killed on each side. There have not been diplomatic ties, other than when Armenia was part of the Soviet Union. The border was closed during the 1988-94 conflict over the Azerbaijani region of Nagorno-Karabakh.
Now the border might open, possibly by the new year, officials on each side suggest, although the greater impetus for a deal clearly comes from Armenia. It is landlocked, and has an urgent need for trade. As its President, Serzh Sargsyan, said yesterday: “Armenia initiated the possibility of normalising relations” — adding, grandly but justifiably, that he had done so “with dignity as it is appropriate to the civilised world of the 21st century”.
Advertisement
The agreement, brokered by Swiss officials and taking shape since April, baldly leaves aside history, genocide or the frozen Nagorno-Karabakh dispute (although Turkey insists progress on this front needs to happen in parallel). This is what you might call constructive evasion. We should hope that they manage at least to open the border. Allowing everyday contact would be an antidote to the understandable difficulty in forgetting who slaughtered whom a century ago.
It would also take the sting out of the repeated eruptions in American politics over the issue, powered by the US’s large Armenian community. Two years ago, President Bush clashed with a Democrat-led House of Representatives committee that denounced the 1915 deaths as genocide, even though a phalanx of former secretaries of state warned about the impact on relations with Turkey, a crucial ally. If Armenia and Turkey can be talked down from the embrace of this old conflict, it is even possible that the US Congress eventually can, too.