Jul 30 () –
Yerevan and Ankara agreed on Tuesday to consider opening a railway border crossing between the Turkish city of Akyaka and the Armenian city of Ajurik as part of the normalisation process between the two countries.
Armenian Deputy Speaker of the National Assembly Ruben Rubinyan met with Turkish delegation representative Serdar Kilic in Margara, near the Turkish border, the Armenian Foreign Ministry said on Tuesday.
The parties reaffirmed their commitment to agreements reached at other meetings and agreed to assess technical steps to open the way and simplify visa procedures for holders of diplomatic or official passports.
The talks began in December 2021. During the fourth meeting held in July 2022 in Vienna, the capital of Austria, both delegations agreed to reopen the land border crossing for third-country nationals.
The two countries have been engaged for months in a process of normalising their diplomatic ties, which have been severely damaged by Turkey’s support for Azerbaijan in the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict and by Ankara’s refusal to recognise the Armenian genocide committed by the former Ottoman Empire between 1915 and 1923.
Turkey does not deny that the massacres of Armenian civilians took place, but it does not admit that they were genocide, and maintains that the deaths were not the result of a mass extermination plan by the Ottoman Empire.
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