No agreement yet on next meetings of special envoys of Armenia and Turkey - MFA

YEREVAN, Oct. 14. /ARKA/. Armenia and Turkey have not reached yet an agreement on holding next meetings of their special representatives for the normalization of relations, Armenian Foreign Ministry spokesman Vahan Hunanyan said.

"During the October 6 meeting in Prague (of Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan and Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan), no agreement was reached on holding meetings of special representatives in Turkey or Armenia in turns. Various proposals were made, including opening the border to holders of diplomatic passports of third countries. An agreement was reached to discuss these proposals in working order," Hunanyan told TASS news agency.

Earlier, Turkish Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu said that next talks between special representatives of the two countries will be held in turn in Turkey and Armenia.

The latest, fourth meeting of the special envoys - Ruben Rubinyan of Armenia and Serdar Kilic of Turkey was held on July 1 in Vienna, Austria.

The first round of talks was held in Moscow on Jan. 14, where both parties agreed to continue negotiations without any preconditions. The Turkish and Armenian envoys met for the second and third time in Vienna on Feb. 24 and May 3, 2022.

As part of the normalization dialogue, on March 12, 2022 a meeting took place between the foreign ministers of Turkey and Armenia on the sidelines of the Antalya Diplomacy Forum.

Although Turkey was one of the first countries to recognize Armenia’s independence from the former Soviet Union, the countries have no diplomatic ties and Turkey shut down their common border in 1993, in a show of solidarity with Azerbaijan which was locked in a conflict with Armenia over the Nagorno-Karabakh region.

Turkey also refuses to recognize the Armenian genocide, committed during 1915-1923 when an estimated 1.5 million Armenians were massacred by the Ottoman government. The overwhelming majority of historians widely view the event as genocide.

In 2009, Ankara and Yerevan reached an agreement in Zurich to establish diplomatic relations and to open their joint border, but Turkey later said it could not ratify the deal until Armenia withdrew from Nagorno-Karabakh.

In 2020, Turkey strongly backed Azerbaijan in the six-week conflict with Armenia over Nagorno-Karabakh which ended with a Russia-brokered peace deal that saw Azerbaijan gain control of a significant part of Nagorno-Karabakh. -0-