Turkey Armenian Relations

Seminar paper from the year 2012 in the subject Politics - Region: Near East, Near Orient, grade: 1,3, http://www.uni-jena.de/, language: English, abstract: 1

1. Introduction

Armenian¿Turkish relations have been strained by a number of historical

and political issues and the current status of this relations can traced back to

the last moments of the Ottoman Empire and to be more specific to the

massacres on the Armenians living in this empire.

According to available historical records and depending on the point of view,

between 1915 and 1923, more between 300.000 and more than one million

Armenians were killed by the Ottoman authorities. In the last years Armenia

and its diaspora has campaigned heavily for international recognition of the

killings. The modern Turkish state, the successor states of the Ottoman

Empire, has repeatedly and heavily refused to acknowledge the Armenian

interpretation of events. The Turkish government insists that the

circumstances and the actually happening in this period of time were

different and less horrific than the Armenian version is telling.

Most recently the bilateral relations between Armenia and Turkey took

another serious nosedive in the wake of the war between Armenia and

Azerbaijan at the beginning of the 1990s. As a loyal supporter of the

Azerbaijan Turkey froze its diplomatic relations with Armenia and closed its

common border. These two historical events and their consequences strain

the relationship between the two neighboring states, which still have no

formal diplomatic relation and Recent attempts of the international

community to normalize the relations failed.

In this submitted term paper the historical development of the relationship

between Armenia and Turkey supposed to be shown, whereas a special

emphasis is put on the massacre on the Armenians in 1914/1915 and the

conflict in Nagorno-Karabakh. These two events play a crucial and decisive

key role in Turkish-Armenian relations and are therefore considered

separately. Subsequently the development of the modern relation since the

year 2000 is to be analyzed to give an answer to the question, whether the

bilateral relations can be normalized and a diplomatic relation can be

installed in the near future.