Pashinyan’s “Turkish House” and “generous Erdogan”

Shortly after it became known that Nikol Pashinyan would be on a working visit in the United States from October 22-27 to attend the 79th session of the UN General Assembly, Turkish media reported that Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdogan will meet with the Armenian Prime Minister.

The citizens of Armenia are already used to finding out a lot of news concerning the country, Pashinyan’s travel, and the real foreign policy agenda of the Republic of Armenia from foreign sources, even Turkish ones, so this time the country learned about the Pashinyan-Erdogan meeting not from the statement of the government’s press office but from the Turkish media.

Decide for yourself whether Nikol Pashinyan again deliberately hid something from his people, his voters. Or has the “bar of Armenia’s status” been lowered to such an extent that he, too, not being fully confident in the upcoming meeting, learned from the Turkish media that Erdogan did approve the meeting with him?

There is another notable nuance in the Pashinyan-Erdogan meeting: while on a working visit to the United States, Nikol Pashinyan managed to meet with the presidents of Poland and Cyprus, the Prime Minister of India, the President of the International Crisis Group, and the Secretary General of the Council of Europe, and all these meetings were held at the UN headquarters. However, to meet with Erdogan, Pashinyan visited the Turkish House in New York—the Turkish center, which serves not only as the headquarters for Turkish organizations but also as the center of Turkish culture. In other words, Pashinyan has found his “Turkish home,” after all, his “Turkish house”. He also received a gift from Erdogan, the Turkish leader’s book “A More Just World is Possible.”

The press releases distributed by the parties after the meeting are also noteworthy. They say the parties allegedly stressed their readiness to continue the normalization process without preconditions. A very primitive tactic is to comply with all Ankara’s demands and say that the process is proceeding without preconditions.

Pashinyan’s previous experience of contacts with Erdogan suggests that Armenia will soon make some more concessions and satisfy Erdogan’s demand. The same was before the “Prague agreement of 2022”, when the Turkish leader spoke of his readiness to meet with Pashinyan if Azerbaijan’s sovereignty over Karabakh is recognized. This was also the case in 2023, when a few days before the ethnic cleansing in Artsakh, these two politicians had a phone call. Apparently, it was then that Pashinyan realized that Samvel Shahramanyan, who had just assumed office, should not be congratulated. However, all this will be presented not as a concession but as a gesture of goodwill, a manifestation of the struggle for sovereignty.

What kind of concession can there be? For example, the withdrawal of Russian border guards from the Armenian-Turkish border, which, quite possibly, was discussed by Deputy President of the Armenian National Assembly Ruben Rubinyan and Turkey’s special representative for the Armenian-Turkish normalization Serdar Kilic during a recent meeting at the Margara-Alijan border checkpoint.

Think about it…