Turkey and Armenia to Establish Diplomatic Ties
ISTANBUL — Turkey and Armenia, whose century of hostilities constitutes one of the world’s most enduring and acrimonious international rivalries, have agreed to establish diplomatic relations, the two countries announced Monday.
In a breakthrough that came after a year of tiny steps across a still-sealed border and furtive bilateral talks in Switzerland, the foreign ministries of the two countries said that they would begin talks aimed at producing a formal agreement.
The joint statement said they had agreed “to start political negotiations” but did not touch on when or how some of their more intractable disputes would be addressed, starting with the killing of more than a million Armenians by the Ottoman Turk government from 1915 to 1918, which the Turkish government has denied was genocide.
The two countries have never had diplomatic relations, and their border has been closed since 1993, when Armenia and Azerbaijan, both former Soviet republics, went to war over the enclave of Nagorno-Karabakh. At the border, soldiers of Turkey, a NATO country, face Russian ones, called in by Armenia, across a mini-Iron Curtain.
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In a breakthrough that came after a year of tiny steps across a still-sealed border and furtive bilateral talks in Switzerland, the foreign ministries of the two countries said that they would begin talks aimed at producing a formal agreement.
The joint statement said they had agreed “to start political negotiations” but did not touch on when or how some of their more intractable disputes would be addressed, starting with the killing of more than a million Armenians by the Ottoman Turk government from 1915 to 1918, which the Turkish government has denied was genocide.
The two countries have never had diplomatic relations, and their border has been closed since 1993, when Armenia and Azerbaijan, both former Soviet republics, went to war over the enclave of Nagorno-Karabakh. At the border, soldiers of Turkey, a NATO country, face Russian ones, called in by Armenia, across a mini-Iron Curtain.