AFP<\/p>\n
\u00a0Turkish Foreign Minister Ali Babacan on Monday defended Ankara’s efforts to improve ties with Armenia during a visit to Azerbaijan, where Turkish overtures to its arch-foe have raised concerns.<\/p>\n
Following talks with Azerbaijani counterpart Elmar Mammadyarov, Babacan said better ties between Turkey and Armenia would help to resolve the longstanding conflict over Azerbaijan’s breakaway region of Nagorno-Karabakh.<\/p>\n
“The normalization of Turkish-Armenian relations would have a positive impact on the Azerbaijan-Armenia talks over Nagorno-Karabakh,” he said at a press conference.<\/p>\n
Babacan’s visit came amid a push by Turkey for more influence in the volatile Caucasus region, where Russia and Georgia fought a brief war in August. After the conflict, Ankara proposed creating a new forum for cooperation in the region, which Babacan called for regional governments to support.<\/p>\n
“All the countries of the region must sit at the bargaining table,” he said.<\/p>\n
In September, Turkish President Abdullah Gul became the first Turkish head of state to visit Armenia, boosting a tentative dialogue process between the two countries to overcome their history of enmity.<\/p>\n
Both Turkey and Azerbaijan have severed ties with Armenia, closing borders and imposing an economic blockade on Yerevan as a result of the Karabakh dispute. But Azerbaijani media and some officials have raised concerns that Ankara’s recent overtures to Yerevan could see it re-open the border and lift its embargo, easing international pressure on Armenia to give up control of Karabakh and other territories seized from Azerbaijan.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
AFP \u00a0Turkish Foreign Minister Ali Babacan on Monday defended Ankara’s efforts to improve ties with Armenia during a visit to Azerbaijan, where Turkish overtures to its arch-foe have raised concerns. Following talks with Azerbaijani counterpart Elmar Mammadyarov, Babacan said better ties between Turkey and Armenia would help to resolve the longstanding conflict over Azerbaijan’s breakaway […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":83,"featured_media":783838,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[32,41,89],"tags":[204],"class_list":["post-7813","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-armenia","category-azerbaijan","category-turkey","tag-nagorno-karabakh"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7813","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=7813"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7813\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/783838"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7813"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7813"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7813"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}