ANKARA, Turkey — Turkey has closed its airspace to flights by Armenian plane in retaliation for the erection of a monument within the Armenian capital that Ankara says honors folks answerable for the killings of Turkish officers, Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu mentioned Wednesday.
In an interview with NTV tv, Cavusoglu warned that Turkey would take additional measures if the monument in Yerevan will not be eliminated.
The transfer comes as Turkey and Armenia, which don’t have any diplomatic relations, had been engaged in talks to normalize ties and put many years of acrimony behind. They appointed particular envoys who’ve held a number of rounds of talks. Their discussions had resulted in an settlement to renew constitution flights between Istanbul and Yerevan.
The two nations have a greater than century-old bitter relationship over the deaths of an estimated 1.5 million Armenians in massacres, deportations and compelled marches that started in 1915 in Ottoman Turkey.
Historians extensively view the occasion as genocide. Turkey vehemently rejects the label, conceding that many died in that period however insisting that the dying toll is inflated and the deaths resulted from civil unrest.
Cavusoglu mentioned the monument aimed “to glorify” Armenians concerned in plans to assassinate Ottoman and Azerbaijani officers within the Nineteen Twenties and Turkish diplomats within the Nineteen Seventies and Eighties.
“It is not possible for us to accept this. We can clearly see that their intentions are not good,” Cavusoglu mentioned.
The monument is devoted to members of “Operation Nemesis” – the codename for a covert operation to avenge the killing and deportation of Armenians by Ottoman Empire forces, with seven assassinations carried out by the Armenian Revolutionary Federation between 1920 and 1922.
Operation Nemesis represented “a record of the fact that throughout history, crimes do not go unpunished regardless of how the international community treats it,” Yerevan Deputy Mayor Tigran Avinyan instructed state information company Armenpress on the April 25 unveiling of the monument, on which the names of 16 Operation Nemesis members are engraved.
Armenia’s central aviation committee claimed that it didn’t obtain official notification from the Turkish aspect concerning the airspace closure.
Turkey shut down its border with Armenia in 1993, in a present of solidarity with its shut ally Azerbaijan, which was locked in a battle with Armenia over the Nagorno-Karabakh area.
In 2020, Turkey strongly backed Azerbaijan within the six-week battle with Armenia over Nagorno-Karabakh, which ended with a Russia-brokered peace deal that noticed Azerbaijan acquire management of a major a part of the area.
Meanwhile, Armenian parliamentary president Alen Simonyan arrived in Ankara on Wednesday to attend the thirtieth anniversary of the Parliamentary Assembly of the Black Sea Economic Cooperation. According to Simonyan’s press secretary, the parliamentary president is ready to additionally meet with the president of the Turkish parliament.
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Elise Morton contributed to this report from London.
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