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By Anush Martirosian<\/span><\/p>\n Turkish President Abdullah Gul will face street protests if he accepts his Armenian counterpart\u2019s invitation to visit Yerevan and watch the upcoming match between the national football teams of the two countries, the Armenian Revolutionary Federation (Dashnaktsutyun) reiterated on Thursday.<\/p>\n President Serzh Sarkisian extended the invitation to Gul earlier this summer to underscore his desire to improve Armenia\u2019s historically strained relations with Turkey. Ankara offered to engage in a \u201cdialogue\u201d with Yerevan shortly after he took office in April.<\/p>\n Dashnaktsutyun, which is represented in Sarkisian\u2019s coalition cabinet and has traditionally favored a harder line on Turkey, makes no secret of its disapproval of the invitation. Aghvan Vartanian, a leader of the nationalist party, reaffirmed its plans to stage demonstrations against what would be the first-ever visit to Armenia by a Turkish head of state.<\/p>\n \u201cIf President Gul visits Armenia to watch the game, there will be meetings, protests and calls against Turkey,\u201d Vartanian told a news conference. \u201cBut that will not be organized only by Dashnaktsutyun.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cWe have problems with Turkey and solutions to those problems relate to the future, rather than the past,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n Vartanian made clear that Sarkisian can not force Dashnaktsutyun to reconsider its plans. \u201cDashnaktsutyun has always been an independent political force and has expressed its positions on various issues regardless of what others will think,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n Dashnaktsutyun leaders earlier expressed concern about Sarkisian\u2019s stated readiness to accept, in principle, Turkey\u2019s proposal to form a commission of Turkish and Armenian historians that would jointly examine the mass killings of Armenians in the Ottoman Empire. They said Turkish recognition of the massacres as genocide is a necessary condition for normalizing bilateral ties.<\/p>\n <\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 By Anush Martirosian Turkish President Abdullah Gul will face street protests if he accepts his Armenian counterpart\u2019s invitation to visit Yerevan and watch the upcoming match between the national football teams of the two countries, the Armenian Revolutionary Federation (Dashnaktsutyun) reiterated on Thursday. President Serzh Sarkisian extended the invitation to […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":83,"featured_media":52500,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[32,7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2886","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-armenia","category-armenian-question"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2886","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=2886"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2886\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/52500"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2886"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2886"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2886"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}