Source. Armenianow.com, 02.10.2009
Gayane Mkrtchyan

President Serzh Sargsyan’s majority coalition in the National Assembly defended his continuing policy of rapprochement with Turkey as the issue came up for discussion at a special parliamentary hearing on Thursday.

Addressing an audience that also included non-parliamentary politicians, academicians and experts, Foreign Minister Edward Nalbandyan stressed that Armenia initiated normalization with Turkey based on the understanding that it will proceed without preconditions.

Nalbandyan thus responded to longstanding assertions made by government critics that Sargsyan’s fence-mending policy compromises on the Armenian push for the international affirmation of Ottoman-era killings of 1.5 million Armenians as genocide as well as precludes future territorial claims. Critics also see the danger of Armenian-Turkish normalization being linked with a separate negotiating process between Armenia and Azerbaijan over the disputed Nagorno-Karabakh region.

“From this tribune, I am once again responding to the voiced concerns and even accusations. Are there really preconditions in the initialed Armenian-Turkish protocols? No, no and once again, no! Are we questioning the fact of genocide? Are we hampering the international recognition of the Armenian Genocide? Is there a link between the initialed documents and the Nagorno-Karabakh negotiating process? No, no and once again, no!”

While the parliament’s majority parties used the tribune to once again make the case for the expected deal with Turkey, critics from the parliament opposition as well as representatives of political forces not represented in the legislature voiced their concerns and criticism in connection with the protocols.

Opposition Heritage party faction leader Stepan Safaryan stated with irony that the protocols “mirror the ‘strong’ state that the Armenian authorities have built during the years of independence.”

Armen Rustamyan, a senior member of the Armenian Revolutionary Federation (ARF, Dashnaktsutyun), reiterated his party’s position that the protocols contain preconditions. He said that “when someone wants to poison another person, he doesn’t write ‘poison’ on the cup.”

Another prominent Dashnak parliamentarian Vahan Hovhannisyan, in particular, castigated the government over what the party and many critic view as its concession regarding the establishment of an intergovernmental sub-commission tasked with implementing “a dialogue on the historical dimension with the aim to restore mutual confidence between the two nations, including an impartial scientific examination of the historical records and archives to define existing problems and formulate recommendations” – a wording that is perceived as agreement to study, i.e. “question” the fact of the 1915-1918 Armenian Genocide in Ottoman Turkey.

Hovhannisyan said that the establishment of such a body implies that the substantial body of evidence available throughout the world today that proves the fact of genocide is now being erased.

“It turns out that this evidence is not that weighty, new evidence is needed. Don’t you think that this is the manifestation of Armenian amateurism in the government system?” charged Hovhannisyan.

Democratic Party of Armenia leader Aram Sargsyan also challenged the professionalism of Armenian diplomats that negotiated the protocols. “Was there any specialist in international law among them?” he queried. “If there was, then our diplomacy is a joke on an international scale. I think our diplomacy either had a limited participation or no participation at all.”

Former parliament speaker Tigran Torosyan, currently a non-aligned MP, criticized the government for agreeing to make concessions to Turkey without getting anything in return. He explained that what Turkey is expected to do, such as opening the border, is rather this country’s obligation defined by international law.

Armenia’s former ambassador to Canada Ara Papian, likewise, spoke against the protocols. He went further to say that the documents run counter to the Armenian Constitution and that there are all “political, economic, legal grounds” to reject them.

Head of the Polit-economy research center Andranik Tevanyan described the normalization of Armenian-Turkish relations as “fake friendship.”

And the speech by the head of the “Ararat” center for strategic research Armen Ayvazyan drew particularly stormy applause.

“What do the impudent words of [Turkish] Prime Minister [Recep Tayyip] Erdogan mean when he calls on Armenia to free itself from the influence of its Diaspora and says that the Diaspora does not give anything to you? This is a word uttered by a colonizer and addressed to the colonized. The Diaspora is a unit of the Armenian nation created by them. Do they now want to destroy it by cutting it off from Armenia? They are depriving the Armenians of their idea to create a common homeland. Is Armenia’s turn next?” said Ayvazyan in his emotionally charged speech.

Predictably, representatives of the governing coalition, and notably Sargsyan’s Republican Party of Armenia (RPA), dismissed this criticism.

RPA faction secretary Edward Sharmazanov stressed that, if any, it is Turkey that should feel concerned in respect of the intergovernmental sub-commission.

“I have consulted with many historians and arrived at the conclusion that it is the party that has always falsified history, that is Turkey, that should have worries here. This sub-commission can become a delayed action bomb for Turkey,” concluded Sharmazanov.

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