ISTANBUL, 23 April 2005 — Turkish Foreign Minister Abdullah Gul yesterday urged him his Armenian counterpart Vardan Oskanian to respond to goodwill gestures he made at unofficial meetings between the two countries that have no diplomatic relations. “I’ve met the Armenian foreign minister six times, it’s no secret. We have no diplomatic relations but we do have contacts,” said Gul.
Turkish daily Milliyet yesterday said meetings had been held over the past three years in neutral locations with the aim of establishing a raft of ten confidence-building measures between the two. Relations between Turkey and Armenia have been dogged by, among other events, the mass killings of Armenians during the fall of the Ottoman Empire (the predecessor of modern Turkey) 90 years ago.
Armenians say up to 1.5 million of their kinsmen perished in orchestrated killings between 1915 and 1917 as the Ottoman Empire was falling apart.
Ankara counters that 300,000 Armenians and thousands of Turks were killed in “civil strife” during World War I when the Armenians rose against their Ottoman rulers and sided with invading Russian troops. “We have made one gesture after another, but they have not reciprocated. They too (the Armenians) have to take steps,” said Gul. Gul pointed to the opening of air routes between the two countries as one gesture made by Turkey, and a regional trade initiative for Black Sea cooperation as another.
“In Turkey there are 40,000 Armenians working and saving money to send home,” said Gul. Turkey wants Armenia to hand back the Nagorno-Karabakh enclave to Azerbaijan. Armenia seized the Armenian-majority territory in 1994 after a regional conflict with Azerbaijan. Turkey recognized Armenia on its 1991 independence but has never established diplomatic relations with it. Ankara closed its frontier with Armenia in 1993 in solidarity with Turkish-speaking Azerbaijan.
Meanwhile, 17 Turkish coal miners died from methane gas poisoning on Thursday after an explosion trapped them beneath rubble, the state-run Anatolian news agency said. Two people were earlier found alive, but rescue workers had ruled out any more survivors after finding the bodies of 17 men some 300 meters underground.
The cause of the blast at the state-owned mine near the western town of Gediz was not immediately clear. A lack of investment in Turkish mines has been blamed for poor maintenance and shoddy construction that have led to a series of accidents in the past.
In September, 19 workers were burned to death in the collapsed tunnel of a copper mine in northern Turkey. The country’s worst mining disaster was in 1992, when 270 miners were killed in a methane gas explosion near the Black Sea.
