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Svante Cornell: Ankara doubts whether Moscow really wanted either of the processes of Turkish-Armenian normalization and Nagorno Karabakh settlement to see progress

02 April 2010 09:05 (UTC +04:00)

Washington. Isabel Levine â€“ APA. â€œWhat lessons does the failure of the Turkish-Armenian normalization process hold for the future?â€ - Svante E. Cornell, Research Director of the Central Asia-Caucasus Institute in Washington DC has raised such question in his last report concerning the current situation in the Caucasus.

According to APAâ€™s Washington correspondent, Mr. Cornell believes that, the failure of the Turkish-Armenian reconciliation process has helped reiterate one useful conclusion. â€œShould Western leaders truthfully seek to stabilize the region, they should know the place to start: A serious and long-term engagement to resolve rather than to freeze the regionâ€™s conflictsâ€.

According to the analyst, â€œWestern and in particular American leaders cannot expect to ignore regional realities and strong-arm local leaders into compliance with their agendas without taking a long-term and serious interest in the deeper problems of the regionâ€.

Speaking about the Nagorno-Karabakh process, Mr. Cornell reminded that, the conflict posed an even larger problem â€“ but also one whose importance the Western powers fundamentally misunderstood. Turkey had originally closed its border with Armenia as a result of the Armenian occupation of the Azerbaijani province of Kelbajar â€“ one of seven districts outside of the Armenian-populated enclave of Nagorno-Karabakh that Armenian forces occupied and ethnically cleansed during the war.

Meanwhile, US analyst also added that, whether one liked it or not, de-linking Turkish-Armenian ties from the Armenian-Azerbaijani conflict was impossible in the Turkish domestic context.

â€œReality is much simpler: most of the Turkish population and a significant share of the AKP voters and politicians to ratifying the Protocols without some progress on the Karabakh conflict. Given the close linguistic ties between Turkey and Azerbaijan, the AKP leadership knew that a single camera crew, filming from Azerbaijani refugee camps to which 800,000 people had been confined by Armenian conquests, could generate a public outcry against the government should it open the border without Armenian concessions. Rather than understanding this reality and putting serious efforts behind the diplomatic endeavors on Nagorno-Karabakh, the Western powers pushed harder for Ankara to de-link the two processesâ€.

Mr. Cornell mentioned that, Turkeyâ€™s relations with the U.S. and Russia have also suffered. â€œWith Washington, Ankara is frustrated with the Obama administrationâ€™s refusal to seriously try to achieve progress on Nagorno-Karabakh, and especially with its failure to prevent the genocide resolution passing in the House Foreign Relations Committee. With Moscow, Ankara had hoped for support in resolving the Karabakh conundrum; but as senior Turkish officials have stated, Moscow instead grew unhelpful, seconding the American view that the two processes should not be linked. This in turn led Ankara to doubt whether Moscow really wanted either of the two processes to see progress. Finally, Armeniaâ€™s weakened leadership is now highly unlikely to make concessions on Karabakh in the near futureâ€.