PRAGUE (AP) — Leaders of former foes Turkey and Armenia held their first face-to-face meeting Thursday since the two countries agreed to relations.
Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan and Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan met in Prague on the sidelines of a summit of leaders from 44 countries to launch a European Political Community aimed at strengthening security and economic prosperity across Europe. Impression of being a chance assembly of the 3 leaders.
Subsequently, Erdogan and Pashinyan held bilateral talks between their countries’ delegations.
“Sincerely, we will do it to achieve full normalization (of relations) on the basis of intelligent neighborly relations,” Erdogan later told reporters, adding that the assembly was held in a “friendly atmosphere. “
Turkey and Armenia, which have no diplomatic relations, agreed last year to start talks aimed at ending decades of bitterness and reopening their shared border. Special envoys appointed through the two countries have held 4 rounds of talks since then. Their talks resulted in an agreement to resume charter flights between Turkey’s largest city, Istanbul, and the Armenian capital of Yerevan.
Erdogan said Armenia had made some demands in the talks, but gave no details. The two countries’ special envoys and foreign ministers will continue their normalization efforts, he said.
“We have no preconditions,” Erdogan said. We simply told them, ‘Ensure that relations between you and Azerbaijan succeed at the limit of adulthood and succeed in a peace agreement. ‘»
Turkey, a close friend of Azerbaijan, closed its border with Armenia in 1993 in solidarity with Baku, which locked up a dispute with Armenia over the Nagorno-Karabakh region.
In 2020, Turkey heavily subsidized Azerbaijan in the six-week dispute with Armenia over Nagorno-Karabakh, which ended with a Russian-brokered peace deal that allowed Azerbaijan to take over a significant component of the region.
Turkey and Armenia also have more than a century of hostility over the deaths of around 1. 5 million Armenians in the massacres, deportations and forced marches that began in 1915 in Ottoman Turkey.
This is the moment of the attempt at reconciliation between Ankara and Yerevan. Turkey and Armenia reached an agreement in 2009 to identify formal relations and open their border, but the agreement was never ratified due to strong opposition from Azerbaijan.
Last month, Armenia and Azerbaijan brokered a ceasefire to end an outbreak of fighting that left 155 people dead on both sides.