Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan and Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan discussed efforts to normalize relations between their countries in a phone call on Wednesday.
Pashinyan was reported to congratulate Erdogan on the Eid al-Adha Muslim holiday. His press office said the two leaders discussed the implementation of an agreement to open the Turkish-Armenian border to citizens of third countries. It did not elaborate.
Ankara and Yerevan reached the agreement last July after several rounds of negotiations held by their special envoys. They have still not said when it will be put into practice.
According to a Turkish readout of the phone call cited by the Anatolia news agency, Erdogan told Pashinyan that the two neighboring states should continue to take “confidence-building measures.” No other details were reported.
Erdogan also spoke with Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev by phone. The Turkish leader visited Baku earlier this month. Following that trip, he praised Pashinyan for attending his recent inauguration ceremony in Ankara.
Armenian opposition leaders condemned Pashinyan’s presence at the ceremony held after Erdogan’s reelection. They argue that Ankara continues to fully support Azerbaijan in the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict and make the normalization of Turkish-Armenian relations conditional on Yerevan meeting Baku’s key demands.
Foreign Minister Ararat Mirzoyan visited Turkey and met with his then Turkish counterpart Mevlut Cavusoglu in February in the wake of a powerful earthquake in the country’s southeast. Mirzoyan said afterwards that Yerevan and Ankara agreed speed up the normalization efforts.
Ankara banned Armenian airlines from flying over Turkey to third countries after municipal authorities in Yerevan unveiled in late April a monument dedicated to Armenians who had assassinated masterminds and perpetrators of the 1915 Armenian genocide in the Ottoman Empire. It threatened “new measures” against Armenia if the monument is not removed soon. Pashinyan described the erection of the monument as a “wrong decision” when he spoke to RFE/RL’s Armenian Service in May.
Source: Azatutyun.am
