SOYAK: Turkish, Armenian businessmen play key role in diplomacy

Kaan Soyak, co-chairman and co-founder of the Turkish-Armenian Business Development Council (TABDC), has been actively working on promoting Turkish and Armenian business relations for 12 years. “We used business diplomacy to increase other kinds of diplomacy,” he told Today’s Zaman.

Relations between Turkey and some of its more problematic neighbors have been pushed along at least in part with the help of the European Union, through its mix of conditions and incentives.

The fact that Greece was a member of the EU and that the prospect of accession to the union became all the more likely throughout the decade has also served to boost the incentive of increasing bilateral relations between the countries.

No such stick-and-carrot approach exists with Armenia. And the gnawing claims, demands and accusations that Armenians both within Armenia proper as well as in the diaspora have been making of Turkey have served many purposes, not least of which has been to agitate parties capable of making agreements. Given these facts and the minuscule population of the country — 1.5 million mostly poor inhabitants who make for a poor market for Turkish business — the incentives for improving business ties with the country have been anything but urgent.

But much like Turkish-Greek rapprochement, in which businessmen on both sides of the border emerged as some of the driving forces of warming relations, the improving ties with Armenia have come about, at least in part, because of backchannel negotiations amongst business leaders in the two countries.

Kaan Soyak, co-chairman and co-founder of the Turkish-Armenian Business Development Council (TABDC), who has been actively working on promoting Turkish and Armenian business relations for the past 12 years, is one such example. “We used business diplomacy to increase other kinds of diplomacy,” Soyak told Sunday’s Zaman, noting that when the organization was founded they could not run with a “friendship association” heading or a “cultural exchange” banner and had to operate under the guise of a “business organization.”

Soyak proudly states that everything that was done between the countries, either directly or indirectly, was at least in part facilitated by the TABDC. “We were always in the middle,” he noted.

To his credit, the TABDC was influential in arranging closer meetings between the two sides in 1997-1998. “But whenever we came closer together, the genocide resolutions came up, and the process was suspended,” he said. “It was like a game or a dance: two steps forward, one step back.”

But, despite the philanthropic endeavors, the organization is principally a business organization. “We are all businessmen. We all have business backgrounds. But more than business, we thought we could encourage other tracks to use us to build confidence,” Soyak said. Describing how they tried to spur relations between the two sides, he said, “We tried to highlight the process of business relations between the two sides in the fields of textiles, railroads and tourism.”

“We did our best [to work] with the [Armenian] diaspora,” he said. “It was a lot of work.” To his satisfaction, he said increasing numbers in the Armenian diaspora were coming to the consensus that improving relations between Turkey and Armenia should be decoupled from larger, thornier problems that have hobbled negotiations for decades. A détente, so to speak.

To this end, he hoped to revive the Turkish-American Business Council (TAİK), which has been “sleeping” for years in New York. The time is coming to revive it with the help of the “silent” Armenian diaspora — those who want to further the protocols — he said, referring to last week’s agreement between the two sides, which is the culmination of increasingly warming relations and could lead to the opening of the Turkish-Armenian border, closed by Turkey as a sign of fraternity with its ethnic ally and close diplomatic partner Azerbaijan when Armenia annexed the Armenian enclave of Nagorno-Karabakh.

He cautioned, however, that if the agreement was not cemented quickly, the political cleavages had the potential to harden. To help the Turkish public digest the conciliatory steps and ease the nationalist political discourse that has the potential to hinder politicians, Soyak hoped that Armenia and Azerbaijan would take some small steps forward. Indeed, the organization’s endeavors to create a free trade zone for the textile sector received a boost of support earlier in the year when the US House of Representatives caucuses for Armenia and Turkey agreed to work together in order to create qualified industrial zones that could export jointly produced products free of tax and duties to the US.

Historical precedents do exist. The US helped create such zones between Jordan and Israel as a means not only to promote development in the two countries but also to facilitate exchanges and relations between them.

Other foreign organizations have also taken an active role in the improving relations between the two sides. One such organization is the American Business Forum in Turkey (ABFT), a member of the US Chamber of Commerce.

“About three years ago, an Armenian resolution surfaced in the US Congress,” explained Galip Sukaya, former chairman of the ABFT, who said that at the time, Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan had called on businesses to take action. “I wrote a personal letter to each and every member of the US House of Representatives,” Sukaya said, adding that the resistance of the diaspora was so great that a number of ABFT members were pressured by their headquarters to resign.

“This was a difficult position to be in for the ABFT,” said Sukaya. “I thought it would be better to be proactive than reactive.” He added that he felt a good strategy would be to work toward promoting better relations between the two countries.

The first opportunity was created when the Armenian American Chamber of Commerce was accepted as a member of the European Council of American Chambers of Commerce (ECACC) last year. Seizing the opportunity, Sukaya used the occasion to not only congratulate his Armenian counterpart, David Atanessian, on his chamber’s acceptance as a member but also suggested that the two organizations cooperate on improving relations between the two countries. “He agreed, and we signed a joint declaration when President Gül visited Yerevan for the World Cup qualifier soccer match between the national teams of Turkey and Armenia,” he said.

“As NGOs, we are in a unique position,” Sukaya said. “We are not in government. We are representing American business. Maybe we can start getting closer together and work toward creating projects that would be good for both of us.”

Sundayszaman