Turkish Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu said on Thursday that Yerevan must take “concrete steps” to negotiate a peace accord sought by Baku and open a land corridor to Azerbaijan’s Nakhichevan exclave. That, he said, is essential for normalizing Turkish-Armenian relations.
“I think that [Cavusoglu’s] statement mentioned by you was not [an expression of] preconditions,” Eduard Aghajanian, the chairman of the Armenian parliament committee on foreign relations, told reporters.
“In essence, Turkey has always come out with this position which obviously has never been acceptable to us,” he said.
Aghajanian complained about a “gap” between Ankara’s statements and actions. “Of course one of our objectives is to do everything so that this discrepancy doesn’t exist anymore or is at least reduced to a minimum,” he said.
The Armenian Foreign Ministry did not react to Cavusoglu’s remarks which followed four rounds of normalization talks held by Turkish and Armenian envoys this year.
The Turkish minister has repeatedly made clear that Ankara is coordinating the Turkish-Armenian dialogue with Baku. He stressed on Thursday that Turkey and Azerbaijan are “one nation and two states.”
The Turks have for decades made the establishment of diplomatic relations with Yerevan and the opening of the Turkish-Armenian border conditional on a settlement of the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict acceptable to Baku.
Armenian Foreign Minister Ararat Mirzoyan complained last November about “new preconditions” set by Ankara.
“Among them is a ‘corridor’ connecting Azerbaijan and Nakhichevan,” Mirzoyan told the French daily Le Figaro.
The Armenian government has ruled out such an exterritorial corridor, saying that Armenia and Azerbaijan have been discussing only conventional transport links in their talks mediated by Russia and the European Union.