Turkey Armenian Relations

Seminar paper from the year 2012 in the subject Politics - International Politics - Region: Near East, Near Orient, grade: 1,3, language: English, abstract: 11. IntroductionArmenian Turkish relations have been strained by a number of historicaland political issues and the current status of this relations can traced back tothe last moments of the Ottoman Empire and to be more specific to themassacres on the Armenians living in this empire.According to available historical records and depending on the point of view,between 1915 and 1923, more between 300.000 and more than one millionArmenians were killed by the Ottoman authorities. In the last years Armeniaand its diaspora has campaigned heavily for international recognition of thekillings. The modern Turkish state, the successor states of the OttomanEmpire, has repeatedly and heavily refused to acknowledge the Armenianinterpretation of events. The Turkish government insists that thecircumstances and the actually happening in this period of time weredifferent and less horrific than the Armenian version is telling.Most recently the bilateral relations between Armenia and Turkey tookanother serious nosedive in the wake of the war between Armenia andAzerbaijan at the beginning of the 1990s. As a loyal supporter of theAzerbaijan Turkey froze its diplomatic relations with Armenia and closed itscommon border. These two historical events and their consequences strainthe relationship between the two neighboring states, which still have noformal diplomatic relation and Recent attempts of the internationalcommunity to normalize the relations failed.In this submitted term paper the historical development of the relationshipbetween Armenia and Turkey supposed to be shown, whereas a specialemphasis is put on the massacre on the Armenians in 1914/1915 and theconflict in Nagorno-Karabakh. These two events play a crucial and decisivekey role in Turkish-Armenian relations and are therefore consideredseparately. Subsequently the development of the modern relation since theyear 2000 is to be analyzed to give an answer to the question, whether thebilateral relations can be normalized and a diplomatic relation can beinstalled in the near future.