Istanbul, February 15. Armenia and Turkey have opened their land border, which has been closed for the past three decades, to facilitate the delivery of humanitarian aid to the earthquake-affected regions of Turkey, Armenia’s Minister of Foreign Affairs said on Wednesday in Ankara. Foreign Affairs Ararat Mirzoyan.
Mirzoyan arrived in Ankara today for a meeting with his Turkish counterpart, Mevlüt Çavusoglu, and will later travel to the province of Adiyaman, which, located in the southeast of the Eurasian country, is one of the most affected. by the two earthquakes on Monday, February 6, which killed more than 40,000 people in Turkey and Syria.
The day after the earthquake, Armenia sent a team of 28 rescue experts to Turkey, who participated in the rescue of several survivors even seven days after the incident.
Last Saturday, the land border between the two countries, at odds since Armenia’s independence in 1991, was opened for the first time in 30 years to send a convoy of trucks with one hundred tons of humanitarian aid to Turkey. .
Mirzoyan described the gesture as a “symbol” of ongoing reconciliation, adding that a second convoy of humanitarian supplies crossed the border yesterday.
“In these difficult times for Turkey, I want to affirm once again our will to build peace in the region and above all to fully normalize our bilateral relations with Turkey and to completely open the borders with the country,” he said. Mirzoyan.
His host thanked the neighboring country for the gesture during the press conference of the two ministers in the Turkish capital.
“Armenia reached out to us in these difficult days and showed solidarity and cooperation,” Çavusoglu said, according to Turkey’s Anadolu Agency.
Ankara and Yerevan have had very tense relations since 1993, mainly due to the armed conflict between Armenia and Azerbaijan, the latter country, which speaks Turkish, being a close ally of Turkey.
Several attempts at rapprochement over the past decade have failed, but a new process of normalization has been underway since last year and Çavusoglu and Mirzoyan had already met at an international forum in Turkey last March. ECE
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