Armenia ready to normalize ties with Turkey: FM

By Muhammet Ikbal Arslan and Tugrul Cam

YEREVAN/ANKARA

Armenia is ready to normalize relations with Turkey, the foreign minister of the former-Soviet country said on Tuesday.

“We are prepared to have normalization of relations without preconditions,” said Zohrab Mnatsakanyan in a meeting with Turkish journalists in the capital Yerevan.

He met with the reporters to discuss Sunday’s snap parliamentary election results, which the country’s acting Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan’s bloc won.

“Armenian Turkey relations have their own rational and should be treated on their own merit. Relating it to all other issues is a precondition,” he added.

Political ties between Ankara and Yerevan remain frozen owing to the Karabakh conflict as well as the legacy of killings during the First World War, which the Armenian diaspora and government as “genocide” -- a description which Turkey refutes.

The Armenian occupation of Nagorno-Karabakh -- a disputed territory between Azerbaijan and Armenia -- led to the closing of the frontier with Turkey, which sides with Baku in the drawn-out dispute.

Pashinyan, whose My Step Alliance garnered 70.4 percent of the votes at the Sunday’s snap parliamentary elections, earlier said:

“I have already said many times that we are ready to establish direct relationships with Turkey without any precondition. And we hope Turkey is ready to do the same.”

In April, Pashinyan, a former journalist, led mass protests against the ruling Republican Party, which brought daily life in Yerevan to a standstill and forced former Prime Minister Serzh Sargsyan to resign.

He became the nation’s prime minister in May, had resigned in October to open a way for snap elections.