There is this fear of Kurdish nationalism and MHP, CHP, the two opposition parties basically took what happened at the border in Habur when the PKK militants crossed the border about six months ago and there were greetings, there were greetings by Kurdish families as a sign of weakness of Turkey, how AK Party basically selling out the country, giving amnesty to the Kurds and this is the beginning of the end in terms of a Kurdish state emerging in the region, and that put a hole on the Kurdish initiative. Not only put a hold but the image peace votes started to increase according to opinion polls. Today we’re at the stage where the MHP is competing with AK Party in central Anatolia, in traditional constituents of the AK Party and the top priority of the AK Party has become not to allow MHP to win political capital, to win more votes on this Armenian opening because the MHP is very opposed to the Armenian opening. The HCP is also very opposed. So AK party is fighting for the nationalist vote, the country is in the kind of election vote already and AK party is likely to loss substantial votes compared to the 47% that they received in 2007, so therefore Erdogan, the prime minister does not feel strong at home, does not feel that he has enough cushion room to push through the, through the parliament the Armenian opening. This is why I think more than the linkage with Azerbaijan itself, he is reluctant to give more ammunition to the nationalist camp. That in itself very important and it explains to a certain degree why Turkey reacted the way it did to Armenian constitutional court decision. If you follow these matters closely, you will realize that for Armenia, it was a very big step for president Sargsyan to argue that there could be a question mark in the form of this, the way the protocols have formulated, to argue that there could be a question mark behind what happened in 1915 was a very big step and this was a big compromise for Armenia. Let me refer to the language that exists in the two protocols in terms of understanding the difficulty and to understand that something that I referred at the beginning of my purpose clash between the diaspora and Armenia itself because as you know, Sargsyan was very much criticized by the diaspora for having agreed to the protocols.

The protocol says that there should be an implementation of a dialogue on the historical dimension with the aim to restore mutual confidence between the two nations including an impartial and scientific examination of the historical records and archives to define existing problems and formulate recommendations. This is what is commonly to refer to as the historical commission. Basically that there would be historical commission to discuss what happened in 1915. What Turkey does not understand I think is that for a president of Armenia and for Armenia as a nation to accept that there should be a historical commission to put a question mark behind 1915 is a huge compromise, a huge step in terms of basically the limits of what they can do. This is why Sargsyan was alienated so much by the diaspora and he basically lost also a member of his coalition. There was a big question whether the Armenian constitutional court would find the two protocols in harmony with the Armenian constitution, whether it would basically give a green light for these two protocols. And after a number of months of examination, the Armenian constitutional court basically said that they are giving a green light but that this should not mean that Armenia will give up its right to pursue genocide recognition, which is part of the constitution. And this gave Turkey the opportunity to say, “Aha, see they’re still after genocide recognition.”