U.S. prompts Turkey to open border with Armenia

"We were delighted that the president of Armenia reached out to President Gul and invited him to Yerevan and delighted also that President Gul accepted the invitation," assistant secretary of state for European and Eurasian affairs Dan Fried told the House Foreign Affairs Committee at a hearing on the recent Russia-Georgia conflict.

He said the United States had been encouraging Armenia and neighboring Turkey and Azerbaijan to work toward settling their differences and that his policy would remain in place.

"I'm glad that we have an ambassador going out there soon and we'd certainly hope to see Armenia's relative isolation end," Fried said. "We want its borders open and its relations improved and we're going to work to that end,” he was quoted by the TDN as saying.

The border between the two countries has been closed since 1993, when Turkey protested Armenia's occupation of the Nagorno-Karabakh region of Azerbaijan, a close Turkish ally.

In a first effort to break the ice, Gul briefly visited Yerevan last week on the occasion of a World Cup football game between the two countries' national teams, where he met with Armenian President Serzh Sargsyan.

Both presidents said they were happy with this first contact and pledged to strive to improve relations.

Turkey is among the first countries that recognized Armenia when it declared its independency in the early 1990s.

However, there is also 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.