ArmeniaNow  --  The departing 2011 has brought no progress in the Armenian-Turkish rapprochement process, but has rather aggravated the existing antagonisms.

The first and loudest sign of antagonism was the January campaign against the demolition of a monument in Kars symbolizing “Armenian-Turkish friendship”. The catch is that the opening of this monument in 2008 was related to the signing of the Armenian-Turkish protocols the same year. The February 2 decree by the Majlis of Kars to dismantle the monument became the symbol of the year and defined the tenor of all the subsequent developments.

In January Armenian president Serzh Sargsyan stated while in Cyprus that the northern part of “a brother country to Armenia” occupied by Turks has to be returned and brought Nakhijevan as an example of Turkish occupation.

In response Turkish premier Recep Tayyip Erdogan stated that soon Nakhijevan would be connected with Turkey by also a railway. “Nakhijevan is our issue. So let no one expect a different approach from us”.

Acts of protest were held in Yerevan to mark 90 years since the signing of a historic agreement in Moscow on “Friendship and Brotherhood” between Soviet Russia and Turkey, curtailing Armenian lands in favor of Turkey and Azerbaijan.

No wonder that unlike the past two years there has been no communication between Ankara and Yerevan in 2011 on an official level. The parties, however, did not miss a chance to maintain the “mediated dialogue” on every possible occasion.

After the appearance of a new state on the world’s political map– July 9 marked the independence of South Sudan – the Armenian president, in his speech from the UN General Assembly rostrum, congratulated the “new, 193rd, member of UN” and stated that it was a vivid example of how the international community should react to acts of genocide.

There hasn’t been much non-official communication either. One rare but rather controversial event was Armenians’ pilgrimage in September to the island of Akhtamar, which did not receive a unanimous response among the Armenian community. Aram I, the Catholicos of Cilicia, refused to participate and warned his counterparts against it; he also addressed a letter to the Turkish premier, saying in part “…Your statement on adherence to justice and human rights can become a documented fact only if you admit the Genocide of Armenians.”

French president Nicolas Sarkozy visited Yerevan in October and reaffirmed his intentions to keep his vow of passing a bill criminalizing the Armenian Genocide denial; he also called upon Turkey to face its history and stop denying the genocide. He said that if by the end of 2011 Turkey didn’t reconsider its position on the Armenian Genocide, France would take measures correspondingly.

On December 22, lawmakers in Paris convincingly passed a bill that would criminalize denial of the Armenian Genocide. The show of hands vote was not tallied, but was overwhelmingly in favor of the bill, which now goes to the Senate. If the bill becomes law, it would make genocide denial by a subject of France punishable by up to a year in prison and 45,000 euro ($59,000).
Turkey reacted by recalling its ambassador from Paris and severing military and other bilateral relations with France.

December was full of events that have, though indirectly, aggravated the tensions between Yerevan and Ankara.

On December 13 the U.S. House of Representatives adopted a religious freedom measure, HR306 approved by the Foreign Affairs Committee in July, calling upon Turkey to return the Christian church properties it stole through genocide and to end its repression of the surviving members of the vast Christian civilizations that once represented a majority in the territory of the present-day Turkey.

It became known also that a session of the Israeli Knesset’s Committee on Education, Culture and Sports is scheduled for late December on the Armenian Genocide recognition issue that’s been topic of discussions for the past year.