People both in Armenia and the diaspora are focusing heavily on the proposed Protocols between Armenia and Turkey, in their efforts to establish diplomatic ties.
The Protocols, announced on August 31, have been embraced by certain segments of the community, including the ADL Eastern District of US and Canada, the Armenian Assembly of America and the Armenian General Benevolent Union.
Some other segments in the community worry that the Armenian side, in the Protocols, is agreeing to pre-conditions dictated by Turkey, in order to establish relations. Successive Armenian governments have stressed the importance of establishing relations without preconditions. Those opponents, again both domestic and in the diaspora, suggest that the negotiations should be dropped regarding the Protocols and that in no time should they be signed.
The government of Turkey seems to provide some Diasporan Armenians with a chance to achieve what they want, namely, the dissolution of the negotiations on the Protocols on which the governments of Armenia and Turkey are working, with the help of the Swiss government and the US State Department.
Last week, during an interview, Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan suggested that the Turkish-Armenian border would not open without the resolution of the Karabagh conflict and the status of Karabagh.
This week, the usually mild-mannered and genteel Armenian Foreign Minister Eduard Nalbandian, hit back hard, suggesting that the status of Nagorno Karabagh is not one of the topics that is up for discussion between Armenia and Turkey.
In fact, he concluded his remarks by suggesting that “If the authorities of current Turkey are not ready today to recognize the fact of the Genocide perpetrated in Ottoman Empire, they are at least obliged to respect the survivors of the Armenian Genocide and their descendants.”
