Turkey has absolutely no wish to regulate relations with Armenia, Turkologist, director of Institute of Eastern Sciences Ruben Safrastyan told Aysor.am, referring to the circumstance that Armenia’s government’s program has no provision on normalization of relations with Turkey.
He also stressed that there is not even a political force there to be ready to discuss the issue of regulation of relations.
He said only pro-Kurdish parties are for normalization of relations with Armenia. “Thus, there are neither relations, nor wish from the Turkish side to discuss the issue,” Safrastyan said.
Turkologist Ruben Melkonyan said there can be no other opinion that the Armenian-Turkish relations are of great significance irrespective of the circumstance whether Armenia has diplomatic relations with Turkey or not.
“Directly or indirectly Turkey is not friendly country for Armenia and different threats may be voiced from it. Turkey and Armenian-Turkish must be under state’s limelight,” he said, adding that Armenia must view its relations with Middle East countries more seriously.
“No matter how much we seek to adopt All-European and global values, geographically we are in East and we are surrounded with Eastern countries and the developments there are of peculiar significance for us,” he said.
Asked whether Armenia must be interested in regulating relations with Turkey in case when the latter is not interested in it, Melkonyan said, “if you do not deal with politics, politics deals with you.”
“If to change this slogan a bit it will appear that if Turkey does not display interest toward relations with Armenia, it does not mean it is indifferent toward Armenia in general. We are of certain interest for Turkey at least on the level of not public statements. We have different issues with Turkey and these issue must be under state’s focus,” he said, adding that Turkey is a threat country for Armenia, thus it should always be under Armenia’s focus.
Source: Aysar
