Earthquake: visit of "solidarity" of the head of Armenian diplomacy in Turkey

The head of Armenian diplomacy went to Turkey on Wednesday for a rare visit to this country bereaved by an earthquake which killed more than 35,000 people there, Ankara hailing the “solidarity”

Yerevan “

”.

"

", greeted the head of Turkish diplomacy Mevlüt Cavusoglu during a joint press conference in Ankara with his Armenian counterpart Ararat Mirzoïan.

Normalize relationships

This visit is in line with the efforts made in recent months by Ankara and Yerevan to normalize their poisoned relations, in particular by the question of the genocide of the Armenians under the Ottoman Empire, which Turkey denies.

After the earthquake that devastated southern Turkey and northern neighboring Syria on February 6, Armenia sent rescuers and humanitarian aid to Ankara, in particular via a border crossing point closed for 35 years.

The opening of this crossing is "

", said Ararat Mirzoyan, whose previous visit to Turkey dates back to March 2022.

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Many experts refer to "

", which consists of helping a neighboring country hit by a natural disaster, despite the tensions.

Thus, Ankara had helped Yerevan after an earthquake that had hit it in 1988.

Mevlüt Cavusoglu also thanked the Armenian rescuers who "

" in Adiyaman, one of the towns hit by the earthquake.

"

."

He added that the two countries agreed to "

" the renovation of roads and bridges to connect Turkey and Armenia.

Debate on the "genocide"

This trip by Ararat Mirzoyan also comes as Yerevan accuses Azerbaijan, one of Turkey's closest allies, of orchestrating the "

" of an enclave mainly populated by Armenians in the disputed region of Nagorny Karabakh.

Relations between Turkey and Armenia remain poisoned by the memory of the Armenian Genocide between 1915 and 1917.

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Many historians qualify the systematic massacres of Armenians by the troops of the Ottoman Empire as genocide, evoking between 600,000 and 1.5 million deaths.

But Turkey, heiress of the Ottoman Empire, refutes the term genocide and maintains that hundreds of thousands of Armenians and Turks died during a civil war coupled with famine.

The two countries, however, began a process of normalization last year, including the appointment of special envoys who met several times and the resumption of commercial flights.