Committee vote may have given Turkey a leg up

Both Turks and Armenians want to reconcile, but they seem to be in it for the wrong reasons. Turkish Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoglu and Armenian Foreign Minister Eduard Nalbandian signed two protocols five months ago in an attempt to normalize their relationship, with strong U.S. support. But House Foreign Affairs Chairman Howard Berman (D-Calif.) was correct when he said last week that “[T]here is a (strong) likelihood that these protocols will not be ratified (by the respective parliaments) in the near future because the Turkish Prime Minister said he won’t put those into effect until the Nagorno-Karabagh issue is resolved.”

Turkish leaders will not admit it, but they have begun the process of de-linking the Nagorno-Karabagh issue from the Turkey-Armenia normalization process. The Turkish government misjudged the situation, and did not take into account the influence of Azerbaijan. For Turks, “[m]aking a rapprochement was a play toward the U.S. and Congress (to get rid of the genocide resolutions),” said Thomas Goltz, a political science scholar at Montana State University. “What got sacrificed was the special relationship with Azerbaijan. It was a huge blow.”

However, Suat Kiniklioglu, the head of the U.S.-Turkey inter-parliamentary friendship caucus, says that such an argument does not hold up. “It writes openly in the protocols that the ‘regional conflicts will be resolved by peaceful means,’” he said. “We’re not talking about the Middle East. This evidently refers to the Karabagkh issue.” But the Armenians could argue that it means Azerbaijan should not use military force against them, and they worry about what will happen as they watch Azerbaijan increase its defense budget.

In fact, “Armenians are not trying to normalize their relationship with Turkey for the sake of normalization,” Kiniklioglu told me. They are “trying to position themselves in a more advantageous place on the Karabagh issue after opening the borders with Turkey.” Turkey is trying to gain sympathy within the international community and find a new way to fight the genocide claims. Why shouldn’t the Armenians do the same thing with their own issues? If not naïve, Turkish leadership failed to understand why the Armenians were interested in signing the protocols. Afterall, Turkey closed its border with Armenia after a massive attack on Karabagh.

Berman was right. Turkey’s parliament will not pass the protocols any time soon, and they will surely blame him and his colleagues in Congress for that failure. In the end, the House Foreign Affairs Committee’s vote gave Turkey a bigger victory than it could have realized.

Based in Washington, D.C., Tulin Daloglu is a correspondent for Turkey’s HABERTÜRK. In the 2002 general election, she ran for a seat in Parliament as a member of the New Turkey Party. Her e-mail is tdaloglu@yahoo.com