GUL TO MEET WITH ARMENIAN, AZERI COUNTERPARTS

Turkish Foreign Minister Abdullah Gul is expected to meet his Azeri and Armenian counterparts on the sidelines of the U.N. General Assembly meeting in New York this month to discuss ways of settling a deep-seated Armenian-Azeri territorial conflict and Turkey’s possible contribution to those efforts.

Gul will hold talks with Azeri Foreign Minister Elmar Mamedyarov and Armenian Foreign Minister Vartan Oskanian on Sept. 21, Turkish Foreign Ministery officials said yesterday.

The Azeri minister said in a statement prior to the meeting that issues between Azerbaijan and Armenia, and particularly the conflict over the Armenian occupation of the Nagorno-Karabakh region, will be raised during the talks.

Turkey’s possible contribution to the settlement of the conflict would also be taken up at the trilateral summit, Mamedyarov said, but he did not elaborate. Turkish officials declined to give details of the agenda of the planned meeting.

The foreign ministers of the three countries had earlier agreed to meet once again to discuss the issue at a previous foreign ministerial meeting held during a NATO summit at the end of June in Istanbul.

Turkey has no diplomatic relations with Armenia because the Christian ex-Soviet republic occupies Nagorno-Karabakh, a territory populated by ethnic Armenians but assigned to Turkic-speaking, mainly-Muslim Azerbaijan in Soviet times.

As a protest to Armenia’s occupation of the Azeri territory of Nagorno-Karabakh, Turkey closed its border with Armenia a decade ago.

However, both the United States and the European Union, which Turkey aspires to join, have called on Turkey to revise its border gate policy and lift its trade blockade. The Western countries insist that the opening of the gate would lead to benefits for the peoples of the region. Azerbaijan, on the other hand, opposes the idea, fearing such a step would undermine its leverage in negotiations with Armenia.

Turkish officials have said that the reopening of the gate depended on Armenian troop withdrawal from the disputed region as well as a halt to Yerevan’s support for Armenian diaspora efforts to win international recognition for an alleged Armenian genocide at the hands of the late Ottoman Empire.

“Opening the Armenian border gate is not on our agenda,” Foreign Ministry officials told the Turkish Daily News.

As well as international pressure, Ankara has faced lobbying from Turkish business interests keen to trade freely with Armenia. But Turkish diplomats say Ankara will not act without Azerbaijan’s consent.

Turkey and Azerbaijan have close linguistic and cultural ties, in addition to which the two countries will be linked in the near future by an oil pipeline pumping crude from the Caspian Sea to the Turkish Mediterranean port of Ceyhan.