Turkey restricts airspace to Armenia over genocide memorial

Turkey’s foreign minister has stated that the country has closed its airspace to Armenian flights in response to a new monument that was erected in Yerevan commemorating a program to assassinate perpetrators of the Armenian genocide.

In an interview with NTV television on May 3, Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu said that the monument “glorifies terrorists,” and as a result, “we closed our airspace for Armenian planes.” It is unclear which Armenian planes are affected by the ban.

One Armenian airline, Flyone, reported on April 29 that a flight from Paris to Yerevan was forced to land in Moldova because it was unexpectedly refused permission to use Turkish airspace.

While Armenia and Turkey are pursuing a fitful process of rapprochement, the ban comes as relations between the two nations appear to have taken a step backwards. Ankara and Yerevan had reached tentative agreements to reopen their land border to third-country nationals, with Armenian officials suggesting that it could happen by this year’s tourist season. However, tensions have increased following the monument’s inauguration, and Cavusoglu suggested that additional measures would be taken if Armenia continues in this spirit.

The monument is dedicated to Operation Nemesis, the effort in the late 1910s and early 1920s by Armenian militants to assassinate Ottoman officials responsible for the Armenian genocide a few years earlier, in which up to one and a half million Armenians were killed. Turkey continues to deny that the killings amounted to a genocide, and following the monument’s erection, the Turkish foreign ministry issued a statement objecting to it, calling it “incompatible with the spirit of the normalization process between Türkiye and Armenia, will in no way contribute to the efforts for establishment of lasting and sustainable peace and stability in the region. On the contrary, they will negatively affect the normalization process.”

While the Turkey-Armenia process has appeared to be on the back burner in recent months, relations between Armenia and Turkey’s ally, Azerbaijan, have been much more eventful. Negotiations between Yerevan and Baku are intensifying even as the situation on the ground in Karabakh, the territory at the heart of the conflict, gets more tense. On April 23, Azerbaijan established a border post on the only road connecting Armenia to Karabakh, and pro-government media have been increasingly openly celebrating that it could lead Armenians to flee the territory.

The speaker of Armenia’s parliament, Alen Simonyan, was scheduled to travel to Ankara on May 3 to attend a meeting of the Black Sea Economic Cooperation Parliamentary Assembly, a regional body based in Turkey of which Armenia is a member. In his comments, Cavusoglu said Turkish authorities were making an exception for the plane Simonyan was traveling on. eurasianet.org