Recep Tayyip Erdogan has criticized lack of progress by the OSCE mediators on a settlement to the Armenian-Azerbaijani conflict over Karabakh.
The efforts by the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe’s (OSCE) Minsk Group, which has striven to resolve the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict for more than 17 years, have not been productive, Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan said on Sunday.
Ankara, which last year agreed to re-establish diplomatic relations with Yerevan and reopen their mutual border, insists on seeing progress on the resolution of the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict, a territorial dispute between Baku and Yerevan, in parallel with its own efforts to normalize relations with Yerevan, according to Turkey's English-language newspaper Today's Zaman.
Speaking in an interview broadcast live on state-owned television station TRT, Erdogan reiterated Ankara’s unease over the grounds for an Armenian Constitutional Court decision on 12 January that found protocols signed with Turkey in Zurich on 10 October last year in conformance with the Armenian Constitution, as the decision included preconditions and restrictive conditions.
“There has been serious neglect by the Minsk trio,” Erdogan added, referring to the three co-chairs of the Minsk Group - France, Russia and the United States. “They couldn’t bring this issue to a certain point in 20 years. If Russia, the US and France had worked hard within the past 20 years, none of these problems would have emerged; neither the trouble between us and Armenia nor trouble between Armenia and Azerbaijan would remain,” Erdogan said, suggesting that Armenia would have stepped back its occupation of the Azerbaijani territory if the co-chairs had put significant pressure on it. “The performance of Russia, America and France was below expectations,” he said.