Armenian PM set for rare bilateral visit to Turkey to meet Erdogan
ISTANBUL/TBILISI - Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan said he will visit Turkey for talks with President Tayyip Erdogan on Friday, a rare bilateral visit that Armenia hopes will reset fraught ties and reopen their shared land border after decades of enmity.
The two neighbors have no formal diplomatic relations amid a legacy of deep historical hostility stemming from the World War One mass killing of Armenians by Ottoman forces, considered a genocide by Armenia. Canada and many other countries.
Turkey has also taken the side of close-ally Azerbaijan in its longstanding conflict with Armenia.
Armenpress state news agency cited Pashinyan on Wednesday as confirming the visit with Erdogan, Turkey's leader of 22 years.
Armenian parliamentary speaker Alen Simonyan on Tuesday said the visit would be 'historic,' and partly aimed at eliminating the risk of fresh fighting with Azerbaijan.
Pashinyan, who has presided over several defeats to Azerbaijan, has pushed hard to normalize relations with Ankara and Baku.
He frames normalization with Turkey as a way for Armenia, whose relations with traditional ally Russia have soured, to build closer ties with Western countries.
Earlier this year he said Armenia would no longer lobby for international recognition of the destruction of Anatolia's Armenian population as a genocide, a concession to Turkey that is deeply controversial among many Armenians.
A senior Armenian diplomat said the two sides would discuss the Armenia-Azerbaijan peace process, and could also discuss the Israeli-Iranian conflict and evacuating foreign citizens from Iran, which neighbors both states.
Ankara closed its border with Armenia in 1993, in support of Azerbaijan in the conflict over Nagorno-Karabakh, an Azerbaijani region that at the time had a mostly Armenian population.
Turkey has said it wants to reopen the eastern frontier, but only if Armenia signs a peace treaty with Azerbaijan, with which Turkey has cultural and linguistic ties.
Armenia has repeatedly said it wants to reopen the Turkish border, and last year refurbished a crossing point. 'We are ready for a new era in our region,' the diplomat said.
A day before the visit, Azerbaijan President Ilham Aliyev will also visit Erdogan in Turkey, Erdogan's office said.
Azerbaijan in 2023 restored full control over Karabakh, prompting the region's 100,000 ethnic Armenians to flee to Armenia.
Both Armenia and Azerbaijan have backed a peace treaty, but progress has been slow, and ceasefire violations have risen along their heavily militarized border in recent months.
(Reporting by Jonathan Spicer in Istanbul and Felix Light in Tbilisi; Editing by Alexandra Hudson)
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