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 ZURICH
(DPA)—There was a three-hour delay to the signing of the
Turkey-Armenia protocols on Saturday and diplomats were
shuttling back and forth frantically to salvage what appeared to
be a threatened deal – but in the end Armenia and Turkey were
finally able to sit down and sign a deal that paves the way for
full diplomatic and trade relations.
“We knew this was not going to be a walk in
the park,” said one Western diplomat, two hours after the
signing ceremony in Zurich was supposed to have begun.
Secretary of State Hillary Clinton went to
work, using her phones, running between buildings and rooms and
forcing motorcades to do U-turns. Along with Swiss diplomats,
she was eager to solve eleventh-hour disputes over language in
speeches for the ceremony.
Meanwhile, the other guests – including
Sergei Lavrov and Bernard Kouchner, the Russian and French
foreign ministers – were sitting together, watching the World
Cup qualification football match between Germany and Russia, and
missing their flights.
For the Swiss, who mediated the talks and now
wanted to host a historic signing of diplomatic ties between
countries with generations of animosity towards each other, it
became a turbulent ride.
But the Alpine diplomatic efforts paid off,
being backed by the muscle and commitment of the US. Clinton
even drove the Armenian Foreign Minister Eduard Nalbandian to
the University of Zurich, where the signing was to take place,
pushing him to compromise.
After more negotiations at the university,
the sides agreed: Cancel the speeches, sign the papers and move
on. And so it was.
Swiss Foreign Minister Micheline Calmy-Rey
made the briefest of introductions, Turkish Foreign Minister
Ahmet Davutoglu and Nalbandian of Armenia inked the appropriate
places, hands were shaken, a few hugs, some smiles and everyone
ran for their planes.
“There were several times when I said to all
of the parties involved that this is too important, that this
has to be seen through. You have come too far, all of the work
that has gone into the protocols, you know, should not be walked
away from,” Clinton recalled on her plane from Zurich to London.
The protocols call for the renewal of
diplomatic ties, opening of the common border and establishment
of a historical commission to investigate the Armenian Genocide,
but for a time diplomats worried they would not be signed.
The Armenians opposed Turkish language in the
speech that would have connected the ratification of the
protocols by the Turkish parliament to a resolution of the
Nagorno-Karabakh conflict favoring Turkey’s ally Azerbaijan.
In the West the issues are seen as separate
but connected.
“Progress on one will help elicit further
progress on the other,” said one Western official. The deals are
“separate, but moving forward at the same time.”
The Turks too were unhappy, even if to a
lesser extent, about language that referred to “historical
events.”
Turkish officials claimed the compromise to
skip the speeches as their own, with one diplomat saying: “We
want to get the process moving.”
Questions still hung heavy in the humid
Zurich air after the signing. The two countries could not
deliver speeches side by side and still required the world’s top
diplomats to work overtime for signatures on documents agreed to
weeks in advance.
The road ahead is not smooth, even if a major
hurdle has been passed. It is now up for the two parliaments to
ratify the deals, leading to open borders within two months.
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