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By Emil Danielyan<\/span><\/p>\n U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice praised President Serzh Sarkisian for his efforts to end Armenia\u2019s post-election political crisis and improve its relations with Turkey as they met in New York late Wednesday.<\/p>\n In her opening remarks at the meeting released by the U.S. State Department, Rice spoke of \u201chealing reforms\u201d which she believes have been initiated by Sarkisian since the dramatic aftermath of the Armenian presidential election. \u201cWe believe that you have made some good steps to address this, and so I\u2019m here to build on that and to move forward,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n Sarkisian, for his part, thanked the United States for its \u201cfinancial assistance and non-financial help\u201d to Armenia. \u201cThey are both important,\u201d he said at the start of the talks held on the sidelines of the UN General Assembly.<\/p>\n Ever since he took office on April 9, Sarkisian has been under pressure from the U.S. and other Western powers to end his predecessor Robert Kocharian\u2019s harsh crackdown on the Armenian opposition. The crackdown has involved mass arrests and the use of lethal force against opposition demonstrators demanding a re-run of the February 19 presidential election which Washington has described as \u201csignificantly flawed.\u201d<\/p>\n U.S. officials have repeatedly urged the new Armenian administrations to release all political prisoners, abolish severe restrictions on freedom of assembly and engage in dialogue with the opposition led by former President Levon Ter-Petrosian. They have said that is essential for the provision of $235.6 million in additional U.S. assistance to Armenia, that was effectively frozen following the bloody suppression of the opposition protests in Yerevan.<\/p>\n Earlier this month, the U.S. Millennium Challenge Corporation (MCC) again declined to disburse the first major installment of the five-year aid package earmarked for the reconstruction of Armenia\u2019s rural roads. The $7.5 million tranche was due to be released in May. In a June statement, the MCC board said the Armenian government should do more to address U.S. concerns about the political situation in the country.<\/p>\n In a statement, Sarkisian\u2019s office quoted Rice as saying that the steps taken by the new Armenian president create a \u201cgood basis\u201d for the continuation of U.S. aid. The statement said the two also spoke about U.S.-led international efforts to settle the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict, with Sarkisian reaffirming his declared commitment to a \u201ccompromise solution.\u201d<\/p>\n Visiting Baku and Yerevan earlier this month, the U.S. Deputy Assistant Secretary of State Matthew Bryza indicated that the OSCE\u2019s Minsk Group, which he co-heads together with senior Russian and French diplomats, will step up its efforts to broker a framework peace agreement on Karabakh before the end of this year. Bryza and the two other co-chairs met Sarkisian in New York earlier on Wednesday. Sarkisian\u2019s office said they discussed the possibility of arranging another meeting of the Armenian and Azerbaijani presidents.<\/p>\n Armenia\u2019s unprecedented rapprochement with Turkey, long championed by the U.S., was also on the agenda of Rice talks Sarkisian. According to the latter\u2019s press service, Rice welcomed Yerevan\u2019s overtures to Ankara and expressed hope that Turkish President Abdullah Gul\u2019s historic visit to Armenia will lead to the normalization of relations between the two neighboring states.<\/p>\n Foreign Minister Eduard Nalbandian and his Turkish counterpart Ali Babacan were scheduled to meet in New York on Thursday in an effort to keep up momentum in the Turkish-Armenian dialogue. They were expected to discuss and possibly finalize a joint declaration that would call for the creation of Turkish-Armenian commissions dealing with economic and other issues of mutual interest. According to Turkish press reports, one of those commissions would be made up of historians tasked with studying the 1915 mass killings of Armenians in Ottoman Turkey.<\/p>\n The idea of conducting such a study is unpopular in Armenia and especially its worldwide Diaspora. Many Armenian politicians and Diaspora leaders fear that the Turks would exploit it to keep more foreign nations from recognizing the massacres as genocide.<\/p>\n Sarkisian sought to allay these fears as he spoke before hundreds of Americans of Armenian descent in New York on Wednesday. He described Turkey\u2019s current leadership as \u201ccourageous\u201d and said many Turks are now ready to face up to their troubled Ottoman past.<\/p>\n \u201cWe must now think about how we can help Turkish society be more objective towards its own history,\u201d said Sarkisian. \u201cA society of which hundreds of thousands representatives took to the streets [of Istanbul] with banners saying \u2018We are all Hrant Dink\u2019 and \u2018We are all Armenians.\u2019<\/p>\n \u201cOne thing is clear to me: we must talk about all topics. Only those people who have nothing to say and suffer from complexes avoid contacts, conversations. We have no complexes and our message is clear.\u201d<\/p>\n Sarkisian also assured Armenian-American activists that Gul is genuinely committed to Turkish-Armenian reconciliation. \u201cI am convinced that now is really the time to solve the problems in Turkish-Armenian relations, and I saw a readiness to do in my Turkish counterpart,\u201d he said. \u201cI felt that he has sufficient courage to make difficult decisions.\u201d<\/p>\n <\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 By Emil Danielyan U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice praised President Serzh Sarkisian for his efforts to end Armenia\u2019s post-election political crisis and improve its relations with Turkey as they met in New York late Wednesday. In her opening remarks at the meeting released by the U.S. State Department, Rice […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":83,"featured_media":775211,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[32,7,34],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4763","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-armenia","category-armenian-question","category-usa"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4763","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=4763"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4763\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/775211"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4763"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4763"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4763"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}