YEREVAN (Azatutyun.am)—Foreign Minister Ararat Mirzoyan and his newly appointed Turkish counterpart Hakan Fidan discussed efforts to normalize Turkish-Armenian relations in a phone call on Wednesday.
The Armenian Foreign Ministry said Mirzoyan congratulated Fidan, who had been Turkey’s intelligence chief since 2010, on the appointment.
“The sides expressed their readiness to continue working on the full normalization of relations between the two countries,” it added in a short statement.
No other details were reported. The Turkish Foreign Ministry did not immediately issue a statement on the call that took place four days after Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan attended the inauguration of Turkey’s reelected President Recep Tayyip Erdogan in Ankara.
Mirzoyan visited Turkey and met with Fidan’s predecessor Mevlut Cavusoglu in February in the wake of a powerful earthquake in the country’s southeast. He said after that trip that Yerevan and Ankara agreed speed up efforts to normalize bilateral ties.
The Turkish government has since continued to voice full support for Azerbaijan and make the establishment of diplomatic relations with Armenia and the opening of the Turkish-Armenian border conditional on Yerevan meeting Baku’s key demands.
Ankara reacted angrily after municipal authorities in Yerevan unveiled in late April a monument dedicated to Armenians who had assassinated masterminds and perpetrators of the 1915 Armenian genocide in Ottoman Turkey. It banned Armenian airlines from flying over Turkey to third countries and threatened “new measures” against Armenia if the monument is not removed soon.
Pashinyan described the erection of the monument as a “wrong decision” when he spoke to RFE/RL’s Armenian Service last month. Armenian opposition leaders condemned his presence at Erdogan’s inauguration ceremony and accused him of humiliating Armenia.
