Sawt Falasteen - Armenia PM to meet Erdogan on 'historic' Turkey visit

Armenia and Turkey have never established formal diplomatic ties, and their shared border has been closed since the 1990s.

The visit follows an invitation from Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan who will host Pashinyan at Istanbul's Dolmabahce Palace at 1500 GMT, Erdogan's office said.

Analysts said Pashinyan would make the case for speeding up steps towards normalisation with Turkey in a bid to ease Armenia's isolation.

Relations between the two nations have been historically strained over the World War I-era mass killings of Armenians in the Ottoman Empire -- atrocities Yerevan says amount to genocide. Turkey rejects the label.

Ankara has also backed its close ally, Turkic-speaking Azerbaijan, in its long-running conflict with Armenia.

"This is a historic visit, as it will be the first time a head of the Republic of Armenia visits Turkey at this level. All regional issues will be discussed," Armenian parliament speaker Alen Simonyan told reporters.

"The risks of war (with Azerbaijan) are currently minimal, and we must work to neutralise them. Pashinyan's visit to Turkey is a step in that direction."

- Normalisation -

An Armenian foreign ministry official told AFP the pair would discuss efforts to sign a comprehensive peace treaty as well as the regional fallout from the Iran-Israel conflict.

On Thursday, Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev was in Turkey for talks with Erdogan, hailing the Turkish-Azerbaijani alliance as "a significant factor, not only regionally but also globally."

Erdogan repeated his backing for "the establishment of peace between Azerbaijan and Armenia".

Baku and Yerevan agreed on the text of a peace deal in March, but Baku has since outlined a host of demands -- including changes to Armenia's constitution -- before it will sign the document.

Pashinyan has actively sought to normalise relations with both Baku and Ankara.

"Pashinyan is very keen to break Armenia out of its isolation and the best way to do that is a peace agreement with Azerbaijan and a normalisation agreement with Turkey," Thomas de Waal, a senior fellow at Carnegie Europe told AFP.

The main thing blocking normalisation with Turkey was Azerbaijan -- a close ally of Ankara, he said.

"Turkey has a strategic dilemma here: on the one hand it wants to stay loyal to Azerbaijan; on the other, opening the Armenian border makes it a bigger player in the South Caucasus," he said.

- Pashinyan concession -

Opening the border would help the economy in eastern Turkey, diminish Russian influence and likely improve Ankara's ties with Washington and the West, among other things, he said.

"Pashinyan by himself won't make this happen, it's only when it moves higher up the Western agenda with Turkey that you might see change."

Earlier this year, Pashinyan said Armenia would halt its campaign for international recognition of the 1915 mass killings of Armenians as genocide -- a major concession to Turkey that sparked widespread criticism at home.

He has visited Turkey only once before, for Erdogan's 2023 inauguration. At the time he was one of the first foreign leaders to congratulate him on his re-election.

Ankara and Yerevan appointed special envoys in late 2021 to lead a normalisation process, a year after Armenia's defeat in a war with Azerbaijan over then then-disputed Karabakh region.

In 2022, Turkey and Armenia resumed commercial flights after a two-year pause.

A previous attempt to normalise relations -- a 2009 accord to open the border -- was never ratified by Armenia and abandoned in 2018.

W.Mansour--SF-PST