Baku, Azerbaijan, May 10
By Rufiz Hafizoglu – Trend:
Prospects of developing ties with Armenia do not bother Ankara at all, but unfortunately, Armenia's political elite failed to understand this obvious fact over the past nine years.
The statements made by Armenia's ex-president and ex-prime minister, as well as the recent statement made by newly-elected Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan can prove this.
Pashinyan, in his yesterday's statement, noted that Armenia is still ready to establish diplomatic relations with Turkey without any precondition.
However, Pashinyan added, the Armenian side remains faithful to the process of international recognition of the so-called Armenian genocide.
Turkey did not hesitate in responding to the usual statements of the Armenian side.
Normalization of the Armenian-Turkish relations is out of question without the liberation of the Azerbaijani territories, the Turkish presidential administration announced commenting on Pashinyan's statements voiced during a briefing for foreign reporters on May 9.
Touching upon Armenia's claims on the "Armenian genocide", the presidential administration reminded that Turkey has opened all its archives for the investigation of the 1915 events.
"Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has repeatedly voiced the necessity of opening the archives. If there were reliable historical facts of the so-called genocide against Armenians, Yerevan would have agreed with Ankara's proposal to open the archives," the administration said.
In fact, Turkey does not have hostility towards Armenia. If Turkey considered Armenia as its enemy, then no Armenian citizen could visit Turkey. According to the Turkish Culture and Tourism Ministry, 3,456 Armenian citizens visited Turkey only in March 2018. And in the first quarter of 2018, the number of Armenian citizens visiting Turkey hit 9,187.
Furthermore, even according to the data for 2010, the number of illegal Armenian migrants, living in Turkey reached 100,000 people. If we take into account that Armenia's top 'export' is labor migrants, then it is possible that the number of illegal Armenian migrants in Turkey will noticeably increase over the past years.
Armenians should understand that Turkey is such a great country that it does not deport these illegal migrants, even despite their utopian dreams of a "Great Armenia".
The Armenian authorities also do not understand that Azerbaijan's territorial integrity and its sovereign rights over Nagorno-Karabakh are so important for Turkey that, regardless of the political preferences of Ankara, any concession to Yerevan on these fundamental issues is out of the discussion.
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Rufiz Hafizoglu, deputy editor-in-chief of Trend. Follow him on Twitter: @rhafizoglu