The Foreign Service Journal, November 2010

In April 1915, in the midst of World War I, the Ottoman Turks accused Christian Armenians living in Turkey of siding with their Russian brethren. The Turks treated the entire popula- tion as an internal enemy and began a campaign of ethnic cleansing. Turkey still maintains the deaths of 1.5 million Armenians were the result of World War I. Following the war, Yerevan be- came Armenia’s capital, as thousands of survivors settled the area. Despite attempts at diplomatic rec- onciliation between the two countries, such as the planned opening of their border for the first time since Arme- nia’s 1993 war with Turkey’s ally, Azer- baijan, relations have faltered and the border remains closed. When the anti-Bolshevik Transcau- casus Federation was dissolved in 1918, Armenia, like Georgia, pro- claimed its independence. Armenia’s independent status was also short- lived, as the country became a Soviet regime. In 1931, the church of St. Peter and Paul in Yerevan, completed in the fifth century, was destroyed to make way for the Moscow Theater. In 1988, fighting between the Ar- menians of Nagorno-Karabakh and the Azerbaijani Army began. When Nag- orno Karabakh’s parliament voted to unify the encircled region with Arme- nia, the Turks and Azerbaijanis closed their borders with the young country. After claiming its independence in 1991, Armenia has been practically strangled from birth. During her July 1-5 visit to the re- gion, Secretary of State Hillary Rod- ham Clinton declared, “It is in the interest, first and foremost, of the peo- ple of Nagorno-Karabakh — but cer- tainly of Azerbaijan, Armenia and the greater region— to work as hard as we can together to come up with an ac- ceptable, lasting settlement of this con- flict.” She also called upon Turkey to normalize ties and open its borders with Armenia. Even though Yerevan most likely got its name from the Erebuni fortress, early Christian Armenians credited 54 F O R E I G N S E R V I C E J O U R N A L / N O V E M B E R 2 0 1 0 Map courtesy of http://chyzmyz.wordpress.com