Turkey’s President Makes Historic Visit to Armenia

Turkey’s president arrived in Armenia on Saturday, the first visit by a Turkish leader in the two nations’ history. The president, Abdullah Gul, was invited by the Armenian president, Serge Sargsyan, to attend a soccer game in Yerevan, the capital, between the national teams.

The trip was widely seen as a symbolic gesture to normalize relations between the countries, which have recognized each other but have not established diplomatic relations. The two nations have deeply held disagreements about what is widely referred to as the Armenian genocide, in which more than one million Armenians were killed by the Ottoman Army in the early 1900s.

Many Western countries support the genocide designation, but the official narrative in Turkey is that both Turks and Armenians were killed in warfare as the Ottoman Empire dissolved. The issue remains taboo in Turkey; many writers and intellectuals, including the Nobel laureate Orhan Pamuk, have faced criminal charges for discussing the events that began in 1915.