Turkey: Armenian Prime Minister to attend Erdoğan’s inauguration despite tensions

Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinian will attend the inauguration of Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan on Saturday, his cabinet announced on Friday, despite historic tensions between the two states. “Armenia has received an invitation to attend the inauguration ceremony of Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan,” he said in a statement, adding that “Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan will visit Ankara on June 3 to attend the ceremony.

Armenia and Turkey have never officially established diplomatic relations and their common border has been closed since the 1990s. Their relations are poisoned by the massacres of Armenians committed during the First World War in the Ottoman Empire, ancestor of Turkey, which Yerevan and many countries consider genocide, a term which Ankara rejects. The Armenian Genocide is recognized by some thirty countries and the community of historians. It is estimated that between 1.2 million and 1.5 million Armenians were killed during World War I by troops of the Ottoman Empire.

Ankara rejects the term genocide

Turkey, resulting from the dismantling of the Empire in 1920, recognizes massacres but rejects the term genocide, evoking a civil war in Anatolia, coupled with a famine, in which 300,000 to 500,000 Armenians and as many Turks died . Turkey is also the main supporter of Azerbaijan, Armenia’s historical rival. Baku and Yerevan fought two wars for control of the Nagorny Karabakh enclave, one at the fall of the USSR in the 1990s and the other in 2020.

In December 2021, Armenia and Turkey appointed envoys to normalize their relations, a desire that the two countries had already displayed in 2009 by signing an agreement to this effect. Armenia, however, never ratified this agreement and withdrew from the process in 2018.