Armenia Backs Egypt In Row With Turkey

In early August, Egypt and Greece signed an agreement designating their exclusive economic zone in the region thought to be rich in natural gas. Both nations had denounced as illegal a similar deal signed by Turkey and Libya’s internationally recognized government earlier. For its part, the Turkish government described the Greek-Egyptian agreement as null and void before ordering more preparatory work for potential hydrocarbons exploration.

Armenia publicly sided with Greece and Cyprus later in August, sparking a renewed war of words with its big neighbor and archrival. Yerevan and Ankara began trading bitter accusations following the July 12 outbreak of heavy fighting on Armenia’s border with Azerbaijan, Turkey’s regional ally.

President Recep Tayyip Erdogan and other Turkish leaders blamed Yerevan for the weeklong deadly hostilities and reaffirmed support for Baku in unusually strong terms, raising the possibility of Turkish military intervention in the Karabakh conflict.

Mnatsakanyan expressed serious concern over the Turkish “military buildup” and cited unconfirmed reports that Ankara is recruiting Islamist militants in Syria and sending them to Azerbaijan. “These are exactly the moves which undermine the efforts towards peace and stability in the region,” he said.

In that context, the Armenian minister spoke of the “same sources of destabilization” in the South Caucasus, the east Mediterranean and North Africa. “Any attempts to export instability and escalation to different regions as part of power projection is deplorable, whether it is in North Africa or in the South Caucasus,” he said in another jibe at Ankara.

Successive Turkish governments have refused to establish diplomatic relations with Yerevan and open the Turkish-Armenian border out of solidarity with Azerbaijan. They have made the normalization of Turkish-Armenian relations conditional on a Karabakh settlement acceptable to Baku.