A monument "to the heroes of Armenia", inaugurated in Yerevan a few days before the Turkish elections, returns relations between the two countries to the freezer. The Turkish Foreign Minister announced on Wednesday the closure of its airspace to Armenian flights to third countries.
Turkey and Armenia, which have not maintained diplomatic relations since the first Nagorno-Karabakh war in the 1990s, had resumed direct flights in February last year, after Yerevan lifted the ban on the importation of Turkish products.
The Turkish government describes as "shameful" the monument to the militants who participated in "Operation Nemesis", which a century ago eliminated, one after another, the Ottoman hierarchs considered responsible for the massacres and death marches in which they lost the lives of up to a million and a half Ottoman Armenians in 1915. A horror that led to the coining of the word "genocide".
Among those killed was Talat Pasha, who had fled to Berlin. Ankara calls the monument "shameful", promoted by the former mayor of the Armenian capital.
Mevlüt Çavusoglu has declared the closure of its airspace during a television interview, pointing out that "at the moment" it does not apply to VIPS, such as the president of the Armenian parliament, who was landing in Ankara precisely today. Armenian air authorities say they have not received any official notification.
The "Nemesis" monument, inaugurated in the Yerevan Circular Park, honors the seventeen militants who risked their lives during the execution of said operation. His best known victim is the Grand Vizier Talat Pasha, considered the architect of the genocide. In reality, none of the three members of the triumvirate that led the Ottoman Empire during those years survived the Armenian revenge.
The descendants said last week that they claimed that thanks to those men, such a horrendous crime could not go unpunished. Armenian anger was also fed by some Azeri officials, considered responsible for the massacre of Armenians in Baku in 1918. Some Armenians, considered collaborationists, were also killed.
Azerbaijani-Armenian relations remain fraught after Azerbaijan, armed with sophisticated Israeli, Turkish and American weaponry, recaptured much of Nagorno Karabakh and surrounding territory long ago. In addition, for several months, Azerbaijan has not complied with the agreement that, through Russian mediation, stopped the war, by obstructing the Lachin corridor, the umbilical cord with Armenia, first with alleged environmentalists and later more openly with checkpoints.
The Turkish coup comes the same day that E. Raisi is received by Bashar al-Assad in Damascus, on the first visit by an Iranian president to Syria since 2010, despite uninterrupted support for his regime. Just today, Çavusoglu has acknowledged that he could meet his Syrian counterpart in Moscow on May 10. The electoral interest is clear, since the opposition has so far been postulated as the only clear guarantor of a peace with Syria that opens the return of Syrian refugees to their towns and cities.
For the Turkish foreign service, the Armenian attacks are not a thing of a century ago. During the Cold War, the terrorist organization ASALA assassinated 31 Turkish diplomats or their family members, in cities around the globe. Among them, Madrid. However, from Yerevan it is pointed out that there is no relationship between Nemesis and ASALA.
Türkiye has threatened further measures if the granite monument is not removed. In practice, the only airline affected is FlyOne Armenia, which was crossing the Turkish sky on its way to its six European destinations. Turkish companies maintain, for the moment, their link between Yerevan and Istanbul, practically the only Turkish city where Armenians still live. Between 50,000 and 70,000. On the other hand, in the ancient cradle of the Armenians, in the surroundings of Mount Ararat, their presence has been eradicated. Most of the historically Armenian towns of southeastern Anatolia are today entirely Kurdish. They also "disappeared", like the Syriacs, from the walled neighborhood of Diyarbakir and from the Armenian quarters of countless cities, from Maras to Izmit.
