Armenia again ruled out Turkey’s involvement in the Nagorno-Karabakh negotiating process on Tuesday after Turkish Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu met with international mediators trying to broker an Armenian-Azerbaijani peace deal.
The U.S., Russian and French mediators co-heading the OSCE Minsk Group held the rare meeting with Turkey’s top diplomat in Ankara on Monday.
According to the Turkish Foreign Ministry, Cavusoglu told them that they should do more to resolve the Karabakh conflict. He said the conflict’s resolution “should be in full respect of the sovereignty, the territorial integrity and the internationally recognized borders of Azerbaijan,” reported the ministry.
Armenian Foreign Minister Zohrab Mnatsakanian responded scathingly to Cavusoglu later on Monday, tweeting a quote from the Gospel of Luke: “Physician, heal thyself!”
“With its unfriendly policy towards Armenia and the Armenian people, which in the context of the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict also takes the form of unilateral military support for Azerbaijan, Turkey cannot play any role in the Nagorno-Karabakh peace process,” the Armenian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman, Anna Naghdalian, said the following day.
Successive Turkish governments have lent full and unconditional support to Azerbaijan in the Karabakh conflict. They have also made the normalization of Turkish-Armenian relations conditional on a Karabakh settlement acceptable to Baku. Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan reaffirmed this policy when he visited Baku late last month.