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YEREVAN, April (AFP) - Armenia has agreed in
principle to a Turkish offer to create a commission
to study the mass killings of Armenians by the Turks
in 1915, which Ankara has refused to acknowledge as
a genocide and which remains an obstacle to normal
relations between the estranged neighbours.
"We propose and propose again to establish normal
relations between our countries without
pre-conditions," wrote Armenian president Armenian
Robert Kocharian in his response to the offer from
Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan.
"It's exactly in this context that we can create an
intergovernmental commission to study whatever
problem exists between our countries...to resolve
them and reach a mutual understanding," Kocharian
wrote in the letter which was released here Tuesday.
Earlier this month, Erdogan sent a letter to the
Armenian president calling for the creation of a
joint commission of historians to study the genocide
allegations as a first step towards normalising ties
between the two estranged neighbors.
Armenia claims that up to 1.5 million of its people
were killed in what it says was a genocide between
1915 and 1917. The 90th anniversary of these
killings was commemorated on Sunday around the
world.
However Ankara argues that 300,000 Armenians and at
least as many Turks died in what was civil strife
during World War I when the Armenians took up arms
for independence in eastern Anatolia and sided with
Russian troops invading the crumbling Ottoman
Empire.
Some EU politicians are pressing Turkey to address
the genocide claims in what Ankara sees as
politically-motivated campaign to impede its EU
membership bid.
More recently the two countries have suffered
strained relations with Turkey closing its borders
with the former Soviet republic after the Armenian
capture in 1994 of Nagorno-Karabakhin, an ethnic
Armenian enclave within Azerbaijan.
Turkey's border closure dealt a crippling economic
blow to the former Soviet republic from which is has
yet to recover.
AFP
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