Is There Still Life Left In The Turkey-Armenia Protocols?

After Turkey and Armenia signed historic protocols in 2009 to normalize relations and reopen the border between the two countries, the reconciliation process between the two countries quickly stalled. As my colleague Yigal Schleiffer wrote, "not much longer after they were signed, the agreement was as good as dead, killed off by a combination of Turkish buyer's remorse, Azeri bullying and Armenian naivete." A thorough report on the history of the diplomatic reconciliation process, by David Phillips, a scholar who has long experience working in Turkish-Armenian relations, concluded that the protocols were in fact effectively dead.

But Phillips spoke Tuesday in Washington, and said he is now more optimistic about the protocols' prospects than he was when he finished that report last month. Recent trips to Ankara and Yerevan and conversations with diplomats in both places gave him new reason for hope, and he said he now wanted to "disassociate himself" from the pessimistic conclusion he gave in his report.

"Based on the meetings I had recently in Turkey and Armenia, I still believe that elements of the protocol represent the way forward," he said. Until recently, Phillips said, he had thought that the Turkish side was committed to prolonging an unproductive debate about the historical record of the Armenian genocide, and that Armenia would never ratify the documents even if Turkey did, "But it's my belief now that the possibility still exists for that to happen, for the Turks to recognize that, with the centennial [of the 1915 genocide] approaching, that it is in their interest to make policy to ratify the protocols, or to take steps short of that, through an executive order to simply establish diplomatic relations and open the border for normal travel and trade."

Also providing room for optimism, Phillips said, was Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan's groundbreaking apology for a massacre of Kurds in the 1930s. Erdogan was one of the "villains" of the failure of the protocol, Phillips said, for linking the issue of the disputed Azerbaijani territory of Nagorno Karabakh to the Turkey-Armenia protocols. Diplomats on both sides had labored mightily to keep the intractable Karabakh conflict out of the intractable-enough Turkey-Armenia reconciliation process, and Erdogan sabotaged that, Phillips said. But the apology for the massacre at Dersim suggests Erdogan could be changing, Phillips said:

“To me [this] shows something in his character that I didn't think he had, which is the ability to apologize. And I know from my own experience working in conflicts ... that apologizing can be kind of catchy. Once you apologize for something, it becomes easier to apologize for something else. So it's still my hope that, as a humanitarian gesture based on Islamic principles, that Prime Minister Erdogan will issue an apology for what happened to the Armenians and will submit the protocols for ratification or, via executive order, normalize relations and open the border for normal travel and trade.”

Phillips is deeply involved in this process, and so if he has reason for optimism, then perhaps the rest of us should, too.