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President of Armenia Serzh Sargsyan announced yesterday that he would accept invitation to travel to Turkey only if Ankara started taking visible steps to deblockade Armenia.

“I will only accept the invitation only if the agreements are observed and visible steps are taken, i.e. I will go to Turkey if the border is open or if we are on the threshold of Armenia’s deblockading,” President said.

In fact President Serzh Sargsyan made similar statement a few months ago in his interviews given to foreign media on the occasion of him taking the office. In this respect, we are much interested in what the need was to repeat the same statement. But there is such need. It was necessary to make Ankara understand that their activities of imitating things have been decoded by Armenia; hence Yerevan will not allow thinking that certain steps have been made and that Armenian side should give response. Serzh Sargsyan stressed that imitated activities are unacceptable for him and that they can not be ground for his visit to Turkey.

It’s worth reminding that a year ago Serzh Sargsyan took exclusive initiative inviting his Turkish counterpart Abdulah Gul to travel to Armenia to watch Armenia-Turkey football match. It’s obvious that the mission of the invitation was to start the process of regulating ties; the invitation has been accepted by Ankara under the influence of several objective and subjective elements. Since then the initiative has been called “football diplomacy”.

In the framework of that process Yerevan and Ankara have had various open and closed-door meetings in the aftermath of which a joint statement was made in April on “road map” regulating the ties. Though the content of the document is not published but it’s supposed that Turkey should deblockade Armenian border without any preconditions and should also set diplomatic ties with Armenia.

To suppose that if President Sargsyan defined October as the deadline of implementing the process, then we should expect that the processes should be implemented before that. But if we consider that no other issue is defined by the agenda but to open the border and set diplomatic ties, then the deadline will be defined October when the football match will be under way.

And is it necessary to worry about Turkey to make imitation? Of course, we do. To consider official Ankara’s statements it becomes obvious that they have kept the formal part and have postponed the process of making statements.