Armenian parliament vice-speaker Ruben Rubinian and Turkish diplomat Serdar Kilic met on the Turkish-Armenian border which Ankara has kept closed for over three decades. It was their first official meeting in two years.
“They reconfirmed the agreements reached at their previous meetings,” the Armenian and Turkish foreign ministries said in identical statements on the talks. “Furthermore, they agreed to assess the technical requirements to enable functioning of Akyaka/Akhurik railroad border gate in line with the regional developments as well as to simplify their mutual visa procedures for diplomatic/official passport holders.”
“Finally, they reemphasized their agreement to continue the normalization process without any preconditions towards achieving the ultimate goal of full normalization between their respective countries,” added the statements.
Kilic and Rubinian reached the earlier agreements after four rounds of negotiations held in 2022. One of them called for the opening of the border for Armenian and Turkish diplomatic passport holders as well as citizens of third countries.
Ankara appears to have been dragging its feet over the implementation of that agreement. The official readouts of Kilic’s latest talks with Rubinian gave no indication that the partial opening of the Turkish-Armenian border is imminent.
In apparent preparation for that, the Armenian side completed earlier this year the construction of a new border checkpoint in Margara, a village 40 kilometers southwest of Yerevan. The Turkish and Armenian envoys were understood to negotiate there after greeting each other on a bridge over the Arax river separating the two countries.
Police did not allow an RFE/RL reporter to approach the Margara checkpoint. An Armenian truck was parked right behind its gate, blocking a view of the compound.
Turkish leaders have repeatedly made clear that further progress in the normalization process is contingent on Armenia’s acceptance of Azerbaijan’s terms for an Armenian-Azerbaijani peace deal. They have singled out the opening of an extraterritorial corridor that would connect Azerbaijan to its Nakhichevan exclave as well as Turkey through a key Armenian region. Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan reaffirmed this precondition earlier this month.
Although Yerevan continues to reject these demands, Prime Minister Nikol Pashinian’s detractors say he is willing to not only accept them but also give ground on the issue of the 1915 Armenian genocide in the Ottoman Empire. They pounced on Pashinian’s controversial statement issued on April 24 during official commemorations of the 109th anniversary of the genocide.
In that statement, Pashinian no longer called for wider international recognition of the genocide and said instead that Armenians should “overcome the trauma” caused by the World War One-era extermination of some 1.5 million of their ethnic kin.
Earlier in April, a senior Armenian pro-government lawmaker, Andranik Kocharian, called for “verifying” the number of the genocide victims, saying that Pashinian wants to make it “more objective.” Faced with an uproar from Armenian opposition leaders, civil society figures and genocide scholars, Kocharian claimed the following day that he only expressed his personal opinion.