Turkey FM Davutoglu Visiting Armenia

Davutoglu also met his Azeri counterpart Elmar Mammadyarov and Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov to discuss the Karabagh (Artsakh) issue which Ankara considers key for a thaw in relations with Yerevan.

From Armenia, the Turkish minister will visit Greece on December 13 and Turkish-occupied northern Cyprus the following day.

In Washington, Armenian National Committee of America Executive Director Aram Hamparian issued the following statement on Davutoglu’s upcoming visit: “Turkish Foreign Minister Davutoglu’s upcoming visit to Armenia for a December 12th regional conference shines a spotlight on Ankara’s continued use of its Protocols to escape liability for mass murder, vast theft and the wholesale dispossession of a nation of its ancestral homeland. The Armenian nation and all peoples should use this visit by a leading official of a perpetrator state to the land of its surviving victims to strengthen our call for a truthful, just, and comprehensive international resolution of the Armenian Genocide.  In coming to terms with its responsibilities, Turkey must not only end its denials and stop its obstruction of justice, but also cease its century-long policy of anti-Armenian aggression, strangulation, and coercion rooted in the legacy of this still unpunished crime.”

He added, “The United States and our partners in the international community, rather than abetting Ankara by arm-twisting Yerevan into a politically untenable and morally unacceptable policy of ‘normalization without justice,’ should be pressing Turkey to forfeit its genocidal gains, to fully return all it has stolen, and to fairly compensate the Armenian nation for its vast and ongoing losses. The Armenian Genocide — an act of premeditated mass murder and national dispossession — is not a bilateral ‘conflict’ to be reconciled, but rather an ongoing international crime that all nations, not Armenia alone, have a moral and legal responsibility to punish.”