Maybe the protocols do not talk about the genocide, they don’t put genocide recognition as a precondition but as the constitutional court confirmed, they still are pushing for this and that the language of the constitutional court gave Turkey the excuse to say, “Wait a minute, there’s a problem on the Armenian side. What they are doing is not in accordance with one of the sentences in the protocols which talks about reiterating their commitment, to refrain from pursuing a policy incompatible with the spirit of good neighborly relations.” So in other words, Turkey argued that what the Armenian constitutional court said despite the green light is showing that they are not, this is not within the spirit of the protocols. So basically this kind of reading of what happened by the constitutional court, I think, was a big problem because it showed that Turkey was not serious about implementing the protocols. To cling to such an element, to such language coming from the Armenian constitutional court in order to show that Armenia has bad faith in this, that they’re not acting in accordance with the spirit of the protocols was basically to ignore that Turkey itself had preconditions about Nagorno-Karabakh and was also a total, in total disregard of the political reality of Armenia. I mean basically to imagine that just because there are these two protocols and that there is a historical condition about 1915, somehow Armenia will forget about genocide recognition, forget about 1915 was something I guess that Turkish diplomats, Turkish government started to really believe in seriously and this was not the case. Of course Armenia was going to continue for genocide recognition, that’s part of the identity of the country, that’s part of the constitution, that’s part of basically the whole political agenda of the country, that the protocol should not be tied to this was the agreement.
Therefore, I think that Turkey failed to understand the political context of Armenia and failed to understand that the Armenian constitutional court was just getting covered to president Sargsyan in terms of allowing him to say, “Look, we will implement the protocol but of course this doesn’t mean that we’re giving up on our collective memory.” I think things unraveled from there in the United States, there was a perception that Turkey was not serious about the protocols and the last episode with the house firm relation subcommittee passing the Armenian genocide resolution, the unbinding Armenian genocide resolution put things on hold in Turkey. So we are at a stale mate, we are at the deadlock, the question is, is there a way out of this? What can be done? And before coming here I watched a long interview with Ahmed [IB] on Turkish TV which was a couple of weeks ago and Ahmed [IB]’s main point was to argue that there essentially three dimensions to the problem, there is a psychological dimension he said to this issue, there is a legal dimension and there’s a historical dimension. What was missing I think was to realize that there is a very strong political dimension to this and Turkey needs to show that it has the political will to implement this. Armenia basically is the party that appears to have compromised on this protocol. Why? What is the big Armenian compromise? Just what I said, to put a question mark behind 1915 and to basically agree that genocide recognition should not be a precondition. What is the Turkish compromise? Where is the Turkish compromise? That’s the big question, that’s the political dimension. Turks basically are getting, in my opinion what they wanted. I’m the one who sent a letter to [IB] in 2005 which said, we want a historical commission about what happened in 1915 and Armenia was reluctant to say, “Okay, we’ll consider this.” They finally said, “Okay, let’s have a historical commission but let’s also treat this as a general holistic issue by opening the border and establishing diplomatic relations” and Turkey said yes to this.