Switzerland unwilling to give written guarantee to Turkey over RA CC ruling

PanARMENIAN.Net -
Тurkey will start talks with Switzerland and the United States to get legal clarification that the recent decision of the Armenia’s Constitutional Court will not prevent a debate between Ankara and Yerevan on whether or not the 1915 killings of Armenians at the hands of Ottomans amounted to genocide, Turkish Hurriyet newspaper reports.



“We can set up a commission of historians that can talk about everything on the 1915 events, yet cannot discuss whether it was genocide or not because the Armenian court ruled this is not an issue open to discussion,” an anonymous Turkish diplomat said, adding that Turkey will continue talks with Switzerland and the U.S. and try to find a solution on legal grounds.



The Protocols aimed at normalization of bilateral ties and opening of the border between Armenia and Turkey were signed in Zurich by Armenian Foreign Minister Edward Nalbandian and his Turkish counterpart Ahmet Davutoglu on October 10, 2009, after a series of diplomatic talks held through Swiss mediation.



On January 12, 2010, the Constitutional Court of the Republic of Armenia found the protocols conformable to the country’s Organic Law.



Following the decision, the Turkish Foreign Ministry issued an official statement concerning the deal. It runs particularly as follows:



“The Constitutional Court of the Republic of Armenia has declared its decision of constitutional conformity on the Protocols between Turkey and Armenia signed on 10 October 2009 with a short statement on 12 January 2010. The Constitutional Court has recently published its grounds of decision. It has been observed that this decision contains preconditions and restrictive provisions which impair the letter and spirit of the Protocols.



“The said decision undermines the very reason for negotiating these Protocols as well as their fundamental objective. This approach cannot be accepted on our part,” says the statement posted on Turkish MFA website.



The Armenian Genocide (1915-23) was the deliberate and systematic destruction of the Armenian population of the Ottoman Empire during and just after World War I. It was characterized by massacres, and deportations involving forced marches under conditions designed to lead to the death of the deportees, with the total number of deaths reaching 1.5 million.



The date of the onset of the genocide is conventionally held to be April 24, 1915, the day that Ottoman authorities arrested some 250 Armenian intellectuals and community leaders in Constantinople. Thereafter, the Ottoman military uprooted Armenians from their homes and forced them to march for hundreds of miles, depriving them of food and water, to the desert of what is now Syria. Massacres were indiscriminate of age or gender, with rape and other sexual abuse commonplace. The Armenian Genocide is the second most-studied case of genocide after the Holocaust.



The Republic of Turkey, the successor state of the Ottoman Empire, denies the word genocide is an accurate description of the events. In recent years, it has faced repeated calls to accept the events as genocide.



To date, twenty countries and 44 U.S. states have officially recognized the events of the period as genocide, and most genocide scholars and historians accept this view. The Armenian Genocide has been also recognized by influential media including The New York Times, BBC, The Washington Post and The Associated Press.



The majority of Armenian Diaspora communities were formed by the Genocide survivors.