Turkey Armenian Relations (PDF)

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.