{"id":11780,"date":"2009-04-28T22:41:35","date_gmt":"2009-04-28T19:41:35","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.turkishforum.com.tr\/en\/content\/?p=11780"},"modified":"2023-04-06T15:42:08","modified_gmt":"2023-04-06T12:42:08","slug":"armenian-government-lacking-mandate-to-mend-ties-with-turkey","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/2009\/04\/28\/armenian-government-lacking-mandate-to-mend-ties-with-turkey\/","title":{"rendered":"Armenian Government \u2018Lacking Mandate\u2019 To Mend Ties With Turkey"},"content":{"rendered":"
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\"\" <\/div>\n

Levon Zurabian, a leader of the opposition Armenian National Congress.<\/p><\/div>\n

28.04.2009<\/span><\/div>\n
Ruben Meloyan<\/div>\n

Armenia\u2019s government will fail to sell any ground-breaking agreements with Turkey to the domestic public as long as it holds dozens of \u201cpolitical prisoners\u201d and refuses to engage in dialogue with its political opponents, the main opposition Armenian National Congress (HAK) said on Tuesday.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cIt is impossible to carry out a process of Turkish-Armenian reconciliation, which requires serious public support, without a process of internal Armenian reconciliation,\u201d said Levon Zurabian, a top HAK representative. \u201cToday any consideration of the Turkish-Armenian roadmap is meaningless. One must first consider a roadmap for internal national reconciliation.\u201d<\/p>\n

Zurabian referred to the April 22 statement by the Armenian and Turkish foreign ministries on a gradual normalization of strained relations between the two neighboring states. Both the HAK and another major opposition force, the Zharangutyun party, have demanded the immediate disclosure of the \u201croadmap\u201d announced by the two ministries. The Armenian authorities have so far refused to do that.<\/p>\n

According to Zurabian, although the HAK does not trust government assurances that the announced framework is good for Armenia, it will reserve final judgment on the deal until it is made public. In any case, he said, the authorities lack the popular mandate to normalize ties with Turkey and accept a compromise solution to the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict because of their continuing crackdown on the opposition stemming from the troubled presidential election of February 2008.<\/p>\n

Zurabian pointed to the continuing imprisonment of 55 opposition members arrested in the wake of the vote and \u201cpolice repressions\u201d against other HAK activists. \u201cThe authorities do not realize that until the domestic political crisis is resolved progress in any process fateful for the Armenian people will not be possible,\u201d he told journalists.<\/p>\n

Echoing statements by the HAK\u2019s top leader, former President Levon Ter-Petrosian, Zurabian suggested that the authorities are exploiting the ongoing rapprochement with Turkey and the Karabakh peace process to get the West to \u201cturn a blind eye\u201d to their poor human rights record. \u201cWe have serious reason to suspect that the processes of Turkish-Armenian reconciliation and Karabakh settlement are used by Serzh Sarkisian for securing the international community\u2019s support or consent for crushing the opposition,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

The Turkish-Armenian dialogue and Karabakh talks were on the agenda of Zurabian\u2019s meeting late on Monday with the visiting U.S. Deputy Assistant Secretary of State Matthew Bryza and Marie Yovanovitch, the U.S. ambassador to Armenia. Yovanovitch held a separate meeting with Ter-Petrosian on April 22, in a further sign that Washington finds opposition support important for the success of the Turkish-Armenian and Armenian-Azerbaijani talks.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s a time when Armenia needs unity,\u201d Bryza told RFE\/RL on Monday. \u201cI hope that the entire country will remain unified or will become unified in supporting an agreement that will improve everyone\u2019s life,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

Chances of such unity decreased further on Monday as the Armenian Revolutionary Federation (Dashnaktsutyun) announced its decision to leave Armenia\u2019s governing coalition in protest against President Sarkisian\u2019s conciliatory policy on Turkey. Leaders of the nationalist party believe that the year-long dialogue with Ankara has produced no tangible results for Yerevan and has only complicated greater international recognition of the 1915 Armenian genocide.<\/p>\n

Zurabian described Dashnaktsutyun\u2019s exit as a \u201cfirst sign that this regime is not viable\u201d and will show deeper cracks in the coming months. He said the HAK will be ready to cooperate with Dashnaktsutyun only if it acts like \u201creal opposition.\u201d \u201cThey need to earn the right to be a real opposition,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

Dashnaktsutyun leaders, who had been in strong opposition to the Ter-Petrosian administration in 1991-1998, have sounded even more skeptical about chances of such cooperation. The influential party unequivocally endorsed the government crackdown on the opposition and, in particular, the bloody suppression of Ter-Petrosian\u2019s massive post-election demonstrations in Yerevan. <\/span><\/p>\n

https:\/\/www.azatutyun.am\/a\/1617771.html<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Levon Zurabian, a leader of the opposition Armenian National Congress. 28.04.2009 Ruben Meloyan Armenia\u2019s government will fail to sell any ground-breaking agreements with Turkey to the domestic public as long as it holds dozens of \u201cpolitical prisoners\u201d and refuses to engage in dialogue with its political opponents, the main opposition Armenian National Congress (HAK) said […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":83,"featured_media":783802,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[32,89],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-11780","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-armenia","category-turkey"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11780","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/83"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=11780"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11780\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/783802"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=11780"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=11780"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=11780"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}