Turkish, Armenian foreign ministers agree to normalize relations

Armenia's Eduard Nalbandian and Turkey's Ali Babacan have agreed on several issues; including the opening of closed borders, the establishment of diplomatic relations and entering a normalization process, in Saturday night's meeting, Hurriyet reported.

Turkish President Abdullah Gul paid a landmark visit to Yerevan after Armenian President Serzh Sargsyan invited him to watch a 2010 World Cup qualifying match between the two countries' national teams. A Turkish delegation, including Babacan, accompanied Gul during his historical visit.

Turkey is among the first countries that recognized Armenia when it declared its independency in the early 1990s. However there is no diplomatic relations between two countries, as Armenia presses the international community to admit the so-called "genocide" claims instead of accepting Turkey's call to investigate the allegations, and its invasion of 20 percent of Azerbaijani territory despite U.N. Security Council resolutions on the issue.

The Turkish and Armenian delegations, headed by the two foreign ministers, held talks regarding Turkey's proposal for a new regional forum in the Caucasus, the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict and other regional issues, Hurriyet wrote.

Babacan told Nalbandian that Turkey supported the Minsk process for the solution of the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict, and added that his country favored the territorial integrity and sovereignty of all countries in the region, according to the report in Hurriyet.

Both foreign ministers were careful to avoid contentious issues, such as the so-called Armenian genocide, the report added.

Armenia, with the backing of the diaspora, claims up to 1.5 million of their kin were slaughtered in orchestrated killings in 1915. Turkey rejects the claims, saying that 300,000 Armenians along with at least as many Turks died in civil strife that emerged when Armenians took up arms for independence in eastern Anatolia.

In 2005, Turkish Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan took a first step towards resolving the issue by proposing that a joint commission of historians launch an investigation and publish their conclusions, but the proposal was rejected by Yerevan.

Armenia also announced Sunday that the foreign ministers of both countries will meet formally on the sidelines of the U.N. General Assembly in New York later this month.