ANTALYA, Turkey —
Turkey and
Armenia have pledged to
pursue the normalization of ties in what the Turkish foreign minister Mevlut
Cavusoglu described as a "productive and constructive" meeting on
Saturday.
اضافة اعلان
After talks with his Armenian counterpart,
Ararat Mirzoyan, Cavusoglu said that Azerbaijan also "supports the
process" of normalization.
Armenia and Turkey have no diplomatic
relations, a closed land border and a deep-seated hostility rooted in the mass
killing of Armenians under the
Ottoman Empire during World War I.
But in December, the two countries appointed
special envoys to normalize relations, spurred by support from regional
powerbroker Russia and Armenia's arch-foe Azerbaijan.
The push came a year after
Azerbaijan used
the help of Turkish combat drones to recapture most of the territory it lost to
ethnic Armenians in a 1990s war in the disputed region of Nagorno-Karabakh.
A Russian-brokered truce that ended the
second conflict removed Turkey's main objection to talking to Armenia — namely,
Yerevan's support for the local Nagorno-Karabakh government's claim of
independence from Azerbaijan.
The first commercial flights for two years
resumed in early February between Turkey and Armenia, but the land border
between the two countries has remained closed since 1993, forcing trucks to
transit through
Georgia or Iran.
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