Europe 1 with AFP / Photo credit: DOGUKAN KESKINKILIC / ANADOLU AGENCY / ANADOLU AGENCY VIA AFP 16:59 pm, June 03, 2023

Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan will attend the inauguration of Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan on Saturday, his cabinet said Friday, despite historic tensions between the two states. Their relations were poisoned by the massacres of Armenians committed during the First World War.

Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan will attend the inauguration of Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan on Saturday, his cabinet said Friday, despite historic tensions between the two states. "Armenia has received an invitation to attend the inauguration ceremony of Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan," he said in a statement, adding that "Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan will travel to Ankara on June 3 to attend the ceremony."

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Armenia and Turkey have never formally established diplomatic relations and their common border has been closed since the 1990s. Their relations are poisoned by the massacres of Armenians committed during World War I in the Ottoman Empire, the ancestor of Turkey, which Yerevan and many countries consider genocide, a term Ankara rejects. The Armenian genocide is recognized by thirty countries and the community of historians. According to estimates, between 1.2 million and 1.5 million Armenians were killed during World War I by troops of the Ottoman Empire.

Ankara rejects the term genocide

Turkey, which emerged from the dismantling of the Empire in 1920, recognizes massacres but rejects the term genocide, evoking a civil war in Anatolia, coupled with a famine, in which 300,000 to 500,000 Armenians and as many Turks were killed. Turkey is also the main supporter of Azerbaijan, Armenia's historical rival. Baku and Yerevan fought two wars for control of the Nagorno-Karabakh enclave, one after the fall of the USSR in the 1990s and the other in 2020.

In December 2021, Armenia and Turkey appointed envoys to normalize their relations, a desire that the two countries had already shown in 2009 when they signed an agreement to this effect. However, Armenia had never ratified this agreement and withdrew from the process in 2018.