After Turgut Özal’s death, Suleyman Demirel became Turkey’s president. On May 16, 1993, in the third phase of the elections in parliament, the political figure in Turkey with the most longevity, Demirel, was elected as the ninth president. In mid-June, he asked Tansu Çiller, the president of the True Path Party, to form a new government. For the first time in its history, Turkey had a female prime minister.
Bilateral Armenian-Turkish contacts, especially within the framework of international conferences, continued. The war in Nagorno-Karabakh was increasing on a new scale. In mid-June, President Abulfaz Elchibey was removed from power in Azerbaijan. Heydar Aliyev occupied his post.
In the summer of 1993, when Nagorno Karabakh forces entered Aghdam, the National Security Council’s session was held with the participation of President Demirel. During an interview with journalists at the end of the session, Foreign Minister Çetin said that the Armenians were taking advantage of Azerbaijan’s internal instability and seizing new territories. The Armenians could not keep those territories and Armenia would pay a very high price for it, he declared.
On July 20, 1993, a large group of Turkish volunteers arrived in Baku, some of which were immediately sent to the Aghdam front. One of the leaders of the volunteer group, Nationalist Movement Party member Kemal Çakir told Hurriyet, “We could not accept the thought that Armenians were seizing our ancestral lands. We could not sit at home while our Azerbaijani brothers were dying in war.”
Former prime minister Ecevit demanded that Turkish battalions initiate air operations to open a corridor between Azerbaijan and Nakhijevan. Ecevit said that Turkey could open such a corridor by air operations without any deaths and only through this route would it be possible to convince Armenia to reach a just agreement with Azerbaijan.
Turkish President Demirel noted that Turkey would not get stuck in a war to save Azerbaijan. The Azerbaijani people should carry out counter-attacks against Armenia themselves. If Turkey took that step, Russia would support Armenia, which would be against Turkey’s interests, he further warned.
In August 1993, Motherland Party MPs demanded military intervention from the government. Hürriyet wrote that 50,000 Turkish forces had been positioned near the Armenian border. Reuters and Xinhua announced that Turkish armed forces were on alert and ready to enter battle and that Turkish aeroplanes were conducting surveillance flights close to Armenia’s borders.
In the early morning of September 6, 1993, the Turkish side opened fire in the direction of Armenia. Major-General Alexander Babenko, commander of the Russian border defence forces in Armenia, declared that his staff was concerned about the presence of additional sub-divisions of the Turkish army, equipped with armoured vehicles and artillery, on the Armenian-Turkish border. He stated that these units were carrying out engineering works in the area. The press service of the border defence forces stated that the command was following the situation on the border and initiating measures, according to the 1921 Treaty of Kars, to prevent a conflict situation.
Prime Minister Çiller made the threat that she would approach parliament with the expectation of receiving permission for war, should Armenians touch Nakhijevan.
A meeting of Armenia’s Security Council was called. On September 6, during a telephone conversation, Ter-Petrosyan and Demirel discussed the build-up of Turkish forces on the Armenian-Turkish border. Prime Minister Çiller threatened again that Turkey “would not sit with its arms folded.”
On September 13, a Turkish military plane made surveillance flights along the length of the Armenian-Turkish border, in the Armavir region. Fire was twice opened in Armenia’s direction.
According to an agreement signed between Armenia and Russia on September 30, 1992, Russia ensured the security of Armenia’s borders with Turkey and Iran. Ter-Petrosyan, who was in Moscow on a short working visit, met with Russian President Boris Yeltsin on September 15. On the same day, Armenia’s president and a state minister, Vazgen Sargsyan, met with Grachov.
Papazyan finds it difficult to discuss the policiesTurkey would initiate against Armenia and their aims: “Our side observed movements in the Turkish armed forces and an approach towards Armenia’s border. There was a real threat, which we took very seriously. Ter-Petrosyan had spoken to Yeltsin and told him that Armenia could see a real threat and wanted the Russian side to clearly express its stance. Besides that, there was also Özal’s unrestrained announcement about throwing one or two bombs on Yerevan. If it wasn’t for Shaposhnikov’s well-known declaration, I do not know what steps the Turks would have taken. But we took the Turkish threat seriously.”
On October 7, France de Harthing, the French ambassador to Armenia, visited the border regions. She took a special interest in the Armenian-Turkish border, the communication routes connecting Armenia with Turkey, and Turkish military manoeuvres directed towards Armenia’s borders.
Leonidas Chrysanthopoulos, the first Greek ambassador to Armenia, where he also represented the Presidency of the European Union, wrote in his memoirs that Turkey made preparations in 1993 “to execute incursions of a limited nature into Armenia, using the Kurdish issue as a pretext.”
On September 21, 1993, Russia’s president Yeltsin dissolved parliament. In response, Russian parliamentarians, headed by the speaker, Ruslan Khasbulatov, and Vice-President Alexander Rutskoi demanded Yeltsin’s resignation. Rutskoi announced that he was assuming the office of president. On October 3, a mob of parliament supporters stormed the police cordon around the White House (a government building, where the Russian parliament had barricaded itself) and seized also the Moscow municipality offices. Later, the crowd was greeted from the White House balcony by Rutskoi, who urged them to seize the national television center at Ostankino. On the morning of October 4, several elite divisions of the Russian military forces decided to support Yeltsin. Tanks rolled up to the White House and shelled the parliament, and the army was able to take over the building. Nearly two hundred people were killed and hundreds more were injured.
In Yerevan, Ter-Petrosyan spoke over the telephone with Yeltsin and declared his open support to him. He also convened the National Security Council, which adopted extraordinary security measures in Armenia. “As Ter-Petrosyan told me, the National Security Council placed the armed forces of Armenia on maximum readiness in order to defend Armenia against a possible attack from Turkey in the eventuality that the ten thousand Russian soldiers guarding the border between Armenia and Turkey were forced quickly to return to Russia,” wrote Chrysanthopoulos, Greek ambassador in Armenia at that time. “Ter-Petrosyan was convinced, based on information that he had recieved from several sources, that Turkey would try to take advantage of serious events within Russia in order to occupy Armenia, using as a pretext either the Kurdish question or the protection of the Nakhijevan enclave. He had intelligence reports that the Turkish National Security Council had recently examined the possibility of the Turkish army’s making incursions into Iraq and Armenia in order to eliminate PKK guerillas.”
“On the same issue, the French ambassador told me on 11 October that, according to French intelligence sources, there had been an agreement between Khasbulatov and Ankara that, if he prevailed, he would allow Turkey to execute incursions of a limited nature into Armenia, using the Kurdish issue as a pretext. The Turkish incursion into Armenia, according to French intelligence sources, would take place immediately after Khasbulatov would have withdrawn the Russian troops from Armenia. This information was later confirmed to me by my American colleague,” Chrysanthopoulos wrote in his memoirs.
Major-General Edward Simonyants, Chief of National Security in Armenia during 1993-1994, confirms Chrysanthopoulos’s assertions. “There were several real threats of invasion from different directions, including the scenario mentioned by theformer Ambassador of Greece,” Simonyants said. “We received information about the possible invasion of Turkish forces not only through diplomatic sources. According to the decision of the Security Council, corresponding measures were initiated. The invasion never took place. There were true threats to the extent that the Turkish army units were repositioned on the Armenian border, field headquarters were established, and the troops were reinforced with personnel, military equipment, and armaments.”
It is surprising that Vladimir Stupishin, Russia’s ambassador to Yerevan, has not mentioned the Turkish danger in his memoirs, in which he presents Armenia from 1992 to 1994 in detail.
In order to exert pressure on Yerevan, Ankara circulated information alleging Armenian co-operation with the fighters of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK). Çiller accused Iraq, Iran, Syria, and Armenia of supporting the Kurds.
The PKK was founded in 1978 and has been fighting an armed struggle since 1984 against the Turkish state for an autonomous Kurdistan and greater political rights for the Kurds in Turkey.
Armenia’s Foreign Ministry announced that Armenian authorities had no links with the PKK and that organisation’s offices do not exist in Yerevan. Turkish media and government representatives, including Minister of Internal Affairs Mehmet Gazioğlu, have frequently referred to the alleged connection between Armenia’s authorities and the PKK. Armenia’s Foreign Ministry stated that, through such fabrications, some Turkish governing circles try to instil anti-Armenian sentiments amongst Turks, discredit Armenia in the international arena, and hinder the establishment of good-neighbourly relations between Armenia and Turkey.
When the alternate director-general for CSCE affairs of the Turkish Foreign Ministry, Daryal Batibay, visited Yerevan as a member of a CSCE delegation, he expressed to Libaridian on 28 October the utmost concern about the existence of PKK training camps in Armenia. Libaridian categorically denied this accusation and asked Ankara for concrete proof about it so that the Armenian authorities could locate these so-called training camps and close them if they existed. If they had no evidence, they were to stop accusing Armenia of co-operating with the PKK. According to Chrysanthopoulos, as evidence he was later sent a videocassette showing PKK soldiers in a camp surrounded by palm trees. Since there are no palm trees in the country, it was impossible for the camp displayed in the video to be in Armenia. A short while later, in early November, the Turkish ambassador in Paris told the French Foreign Ministry that Ankara was convinced that there were no PKK bases in Armenia.
While the Turkish side awaited a convenient opportunity to invade Armenia in the second half of 1993, the Karabakh Armenian forces moved forward in eastern, southern, and northern directions, moving out of the borders of the former Nagorno Karabakh Autonomous Oblast.
On December 24, 1993, Ter-Petrosyan declared, “Azerbaijan’s authorities refused all initiatives to peacefully settle the conflict. All this, including the participation of Afghan mujahideen and Turkish soldiers in Azerbaijan’s army during military operations, display that Azerbaijan is placing its hopes on a purely military resolution and the policy of the Azerbaijani leadership is directed towards the expansion of the confrontation and the involvement of other states in it.”
From Tatul Hakobyan’s book – ARMENIANS and TURKS
This book covers almost the whole spectrum of Armenian-Turkish relations, including the different attitudes of Diasporan circles and masses to the past, present, and future relations with the Turks. Tatul Hakobyan’s work is a smooth mix of history and journalism. This extremely complex and significant period of history is presented coherently, simply, in an easy to follow narrative that links together the various periods during the tumultuous 100 years beginning in 1918. Armenians and Turks, is packed with political insight, historical revelation, and even a poetic vision of a complicated relationship which unfolded, over a century, between two peoples. Hakobyan has established himself as an indispensable journalist, expert, and scholar of this ongoing saga. Written in the journalistic style using strict standards of scholarship, the author has evidently undertaken wide-ranging research. This book is of great interest not only to historians, diplomats, or experts who study issues of Armenian-Turkish relations and their impact on the future of the South Caucasus, but also for a wide range of readers.
Paperback: 411 pages,
Language: English,
2013, Yerevan, Lusakn,
ISBN 978-9939-0-0706-9.
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