By inviting Turkey’s future president to Armenia for next year’s Genocide centennial events, the Armenian leader actually kicked the ball to Turkey’s 
court, an orientalist has said, describing Serzh Sargsyan’s move as a heavy blow to the Turkish poltical elite.
At a news conference on Thursday, Ruben Melkonyan, a Turkologist and a deputy dean at the Yerevan State University’s Oriental Studies Department, said he thinks Serzh Sargsyan’s statement had been elaborated thoroughly enough to create serious problems for Turkey’s political circles in accordance with the letter and spirit of the 21st century information warfare.
“That’s one of the proofs that there has been no official objection or response so far, although in the past couple of days, the Turkish media have been busy with posting the text of the president’s statements in an attempt to analyze it. It is really a very interesting step, so I think the Turkish side does have an occasion for long considerations,” he noted.
The expert said he is under the impression that Turkey now seeks to spread false statements on the level of high-ranking officials in an effort to prove that the Armenians society that the country is really carrying out serious changes, with the Turkish political circles having made re-evaluations in connection with the 1915 events.
“Тhe Armenian president’s statement and the invitation to Turkey’s future president marked an important divide between false statements and real objectives. That divide is the following: Turkey must give up the practice of false statements, and if it pursues sincere motives, Turkey’s future president who, in most likelihood, is the current prime minister must visit Armenia in 2015 to bow to the memory of the victims,” he added.
Melkonyan said he finds that the Armenian leader’s attempt to respond to Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s April 23 condolence address was an important remark in his statement. “Armenia’s top leadership actually evaluated the address as an integrity of non-constructive and false Turkish statements concealed behind the veil of good will,” he said.
As for further efforts to probe into archive for more historical records, Melkonyan said he thinks that historians have done their job long ago, by making public the existing archive documents. He added any new facts, which may not have been known to date, will simply come to re-affirm the proven fact that what happened in 1915 really genocide.
The historian said at the end that knowing Erdogan well, he doesn’t expect him to be in Armenia in 2015.
Source: tert.am