Ankara - Armenian Foreign Minister Edward Nalbandian on Monday said he saw no obstacles to normalizing relations with historic foe Turkey. Speaking in Istanbul ahead of a meeting with his Turkish counterpart Ali Babacan, Nalbandian said Armenia had no preconditions to establishing diplomatic ties and that he hoped that Turkey also had no preconditions.
"We have started an active dialogue," Nalbandian told reporters in Istanbul where he was attending a Black Sea Economic Cooperation meeting. "I don't think there are any real obstacles to a normalization of ties."
Turkey and Armenia do not have any diplomatic relations and the land border between the two countries was closed by Turkey in 1993 in protest at the Armenian occupation of the Nagorno-Karabakh region of Azerbaijan.
Nalbandian expressed hope that the Nagorno-Karabakh problem could be resolved, saying that a declaration signed in Moscow earlier this month by the presidents of Armenia, Azerbaijan and Russia was a good sign of progress.
In the declaration the countries pledged to intensify negotiations to end the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict by signing a declaration which envisages resolution of the conflict on the basis of principles and norms of the international law.
Relations are also strained by Turkey's refusal to accept as genocide the deaths of up to 1.5 million ethnic Armenians in the last days of the Ottoman Empire.
Turkey says that while there were massacres of ethnic Armenians, the events do not constitute genocide and were instead the result of a civil uprising during the First World War.
There has been a recent thaw in relations between the two countries with a visit to Yerevan by Turkish President Abdullah Gul in September to attend a football match, described as "football diplomacy" by the Turkish media, marking the start of efforts to normalize relations.
