“When Azerbaijan and Armenia sign a final peace agreement, we will be ready to normalize relations with Armenia,” Turkey’s state-owned Anadolu news agency on Wednesday quoted Fidan as saying. “We have declared this before.”
“If we normalize relations at this point, we will have taken away the biggest reason for Armenia to sign a peace agreement with Azerbaijan,” he said. “Therefore, we may face the possibility of a frozen conflict in the region. We do not want this.”
Fidan claimed that the opening of the Turkish-Armenian border is essential for the “revival” of Armenia’s economy.
The peace treaty mentioned by him was initialed during an Armenian-Azerbaijani summit hosted by U.S. President Donald Trump in Washington in August. Baku continues to make its signing conditional on a change of the Armenian constitution. It also wants Armenia to open an extraterritorial land corridor that would connect Azerbaijan to its Nakhichevan exclave as well as Turkey.
Ankara has backed the Azerbaijani demands during normalization talks with Yerevan held in recent years. It has been reluctant to implement a 2022 agreement to open the border with Armenia for Armenian and Turkish diplomatic passport holders and citizens of third countries. The Turkish government has stuck to its precondition even after major concessions signaled by the Armenian side.
In particular, Prime Minister Nikol Pashinian declared in January that Armenians should “understand what happened” in 1915 and what prompted the subsequent campaign for international recognition of the Armenian genocide in Ottoman Turkey. Armenian historians, opposition figures and retired diplomats expressed outrage at the remarks, saying that Pashinian cast doubt on the fact of the genocide officially recognized by over three dozen countries, including the United Staes.
In another controversial overture to Ankara, Pashinian’s government removed this month an image of Mount Ararat from the entry and exit passport stamps issued by Armenian immigration officers. The emblematic mountain located in modern-day Turkey but still regarded by Armenians as a key national symbol had been depicted in the stamps put on travelers’ passports ever since the country’s independence.