If Armenia-Turkey rapprochement is prevented, Armenia will lose, the article by Turkish expert Semih Idiz, published in Turkish Hurriyet daily reads. Idiz underlines that opposition in Armenia, supported by Diaspora, intensifies its efforts to prevent the signing of Armenia-Turkey Protocols.

“The argument of the Armenian opposition is that the two protocols – which provide a road map for the normalization of ties – amount to a ‘sellout to the Turks.’ They maintain that this sellout involves both Nagorno-Karabakh, and the Genocide issue. The opposition on the Turkish side is doing much the same and arguing the same, except that it is talking about a 'betrayal of Azerbaijan by the Erdoğan government.’ In short, feelings on both sides among the ‘naysayers’ are so intense that there is no indication that the two Protocols will in fact move forward once they have been signed. According the 'road map' worked out by the two governments a signature is not enough. The Protocols have to also be ratified by both parliaments.

If the two Protocols do not move forward then it is clear that both sides will lose, since a unique opportunity for some kind of reconciliation between these two estranged nations will have been squandered. But if we put the losses on a scale to see who comes out worse as a result of this reconciliation process being scuttled, the answer does not require much mulling.

While the Armenian opposition and the Diaspora – including Turkish ‘rejectionists’ — will have won in that event, it is clear that the looser will be Armenia, whose isolation is already a serious obstacle to its development, as has been highly apparent over these past 15 years. It is also questionable if the opposition and Diaspora will have scored any significant points against Turkey, if by that we mean points that can be translated into political advantage in order to browbeat Ankara into a certain position concerning the events of 1915.

The past four decades should have shown that is not possible. It is true that more people around the world today are aware of the events of 1915, many agreeing that what transpired was indeed Genocide. Very few people who know the subject well maintain, however, that any legal retroactivity can be activated over this issue given all that has transpired in the world since then.

The position we face is a simple one. If legal retroactivity is available for this issue, then what does this mean for the countless other such incidents that have taken place over the past century and a half, and for which nothing can be sought today.

But if the Armenians insist on using the German example, they should be looking, not at the Nazi case, but at what many refer to as the ‘Herero and Namaqua Genocide,’ which is said to have occurred in German South-West Africa between 1904 and 1907.

Call those events Genocide (as Armenians insist) or ‘the natural result of civil war where both sides incurred losses’ (as Turks insist), the fact is that they belong to the historic domain today, rather than the legal one.

If we leave the legal dimension aside and look at the political dimension, it is clear that the Armenian Diaspora has created serious headaches for Turkey over these past four decades. One also must not forget the scores of ‘innocent’ Turkish diplomats, members of their families and other innocent Turkish officials who were killed by the ‘terrorists’ that this Diaspora produced. In the meantime, the Diaspora and its supporters have totally failed to prevent key projects like the Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan Pipeline, or the Baku-Tbilisi-Kars railway line – which bypass Armenia – from going through,” the author concludes.